Leo Villareal

Overview

A pioneer in the use of LEDs and computer-driven imagery, Leo Villareal is increasingly renowned for his light sculptures and architectural, site-specific works. Featuring more than fifteen sculptures and installations, Leo Villareal is the artist’s first major traveling museum survey, tracing the development of his work over the past decade. With non-repeating light sequences, Villareal’s luminous sculptures create dazzling, immersive environments that probe the formal possibilities of light, color, space, and movement.

Villareal’s work bridges twenty-first-century technology with both established art historical precedents and trends in the broader contemporary-art world. Governed by computer code, the artist’s pulsating light sculptures are rooted in his interest in underlying structures and rules. He bases his hand-coded programming—which is manifested through patterns of light—on John Conway’s Game of Life, a mathematical model that simulates how cells live, die, and multiply. His programming both instructs the lights and allows for an element of chance; using computer technology and mathematical rules to activate his artworks, Villareal demonstrates how clearly defined systems can generate unpredictable outcomes.

This exhibition firmly establishes Villareal’s place within the continuum of contemporary art. His sculptures show affinity to the work of Dan Flavin and James Turrell, pioneers in the fields of Minimalism and Light-and-Space art, respectively, echoing their use of light to frame and define space in the built environment. Moreover, he came of age in the 1980s, when artists Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Jenny Holzer were in the spotlight, engaging with issues of advertising imagery, media manipulation, and consumer fetishism. Although paralleling their slick, commerce-savvy approach to art, Villareal strips his own work of socio-political content, relying instead on the mesmerizing sequences of light patterns. While acknowledging these forbears, he sees the coded system of rules underlying his art as relating most closely to Sol LeWitt’s conceptual wall drawings, which are similarly based on a pre-determined set of guidelines. Villareal synthesizes these influences, ultimately presenting a new vision of art that responds and relates to the technological innovations of the twenty-first century.