Leo Villareal, Kiki Smith, Latifa Echakhch, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Jeff Koons at Pace Gallery.

Visitors to Geneva can currently see Pace’s ‘Inner Cosmos, Outer Universe’, a group exhibition showcasing thirty-odd works by seventeen artists from across the gallery’s international programme. They share, says the gallery, ‘a fascination with space, from cosmological heights to the molecular foundations of the self’. Alexander Calder, Robert Rauschenberg, Mika Tajima, Sonia Gomes, Alicja Kwade (see Seisma feature, March 2023), and the late Lucas Samaras – who died just before the show opened – are among the artists featured. Here we take a look at the work shown by five of the artists: Leo Villareal, Kiki Smith, Latifa Echakhch, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Jeff Koons. They represent a journey through the clouds to the stars as we see them, to the galaxy beyond, and on to the limits of the universe … Or possibly more of an inner journey into the minds of the artists.

Leo Villareal trained as a sculptor, but moved into working with light as a result of his annual attendance at the Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. In 1997, needing a way for members of his Disorient Tribe to locate their base camp amid the thousands of revellers, he made a sign out of sixteen strobe lights: visible and unique from a distance. He has since developed many kinetic works composed of white or multi-coloured incandescent, strobe, neon, or LED lights, the pulsing, flickering, and fading of which is controlled by computer code that he writes himself. Composed on a square array of LED lights arranged in columns, each of his Cloud Drawings pulse in non-repeating sequences in accordance with their own unique, randomized evocation of natural phenomena. The result is an evocative visualisation of what it is it like to be inside a cloud.

*Cloud Drawing (Large) 2* (2018) by Leo Villareal. LEDs, custom software, electrical hardware, and metal, 68" × 68" (172.7 cm × 172.7 cm) © Leo Villareal, courtesy Pace Gallery

Villareal is fascinated by the capability of mathematically defined systems to generate unpredictable sequences, and cites in particular the work of the Liverpool-born mathematician John Horton Conway (1937–2020), who contributed to the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory – and is more widely known for engaging with recreational mathematics. In particular, in 1970 Conway invented the cellular automaton called The Game of Life (or Life for short), effectively an early version of a computer simulation game. The means was simple: place any configuration of cells on a grid so that every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, then watch what transpires according to three rules that dictate how the system plays out:

- Birth rule: An empty, or ‘dead’ cell with precisely three ‘live’ neighbours (full cells) becomes live.

- Death rules: A live cell with zero or one neighbours dies of isolation; a live cell with four or more neighbours dies of overcrowding.

- Survival rule: A live cell with two or three neighbours remains alive.

The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. The first generation is created by applying the rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed, live or dead. With each iteration, some cells live, some die and ‘Life-forms’ evolve, from one generation to the next. The resulting ‘life-forms’ range from five-celled ‘gliders’ to complex spaceships made of hundreds of cells that take several generations to move. As the avant-garde musician Brian Eno has said: ‘I was hooked immediately by the thing that has always hooked me — watching complexity arise out of simplicity’. For many years Conway resented how Life eclipsed his many other mathematical accomplishments, but in his later years he could he could say: ‘I used to go around saying, “I hate Life”, but then I was giving a lecture somewhere, and I was introduced as “John Conway, Creator of Life”, and I thought, “Oh, that’s quite a nice way to be known”’. Moreover, The Game of Life has had serious scientific value, motivating the use of cellular automata in modelling everything from traffic to galaxies and, indeed, clouds. Perhaps Conway would also have liked to be known as the inspirer of the Cloud Drawings.

Villareal explains that ‘Conway’s Game of Life employs very few rules, but out of those simple rules, complex and intricate patterns emerge. The results evoke something cellular, like something under a microscope, and at the same time, can appear celestial, like large bodies and masses floating in the cosmos. Inspired by these concepts, I started to employ my own rules in the work I create, allowing the code to develop within frameworks I established, and seeing what emerges. What results is something that gives the visual effect of being very much alive whether by suggesting the pattern of a beating heart, the malleable flow of water, or the slow trail of clouds across a skyline. I think the way that these rules create something recognizable, and seemingly natural to us is what makes people respond to my work, and what attracted me to Conway’s Game of Life to begin with. Nature – things large and small – are all governed by rules. It’s innate to all of us as people, and brings us together.’

*Sky* (2012) by Kiki Smith. Cotton Jacquard tapestry, 9' 5" × 6' 3" (287 cm × 190.5 cm) © Kiki Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery

Clouds obscure our view of the skies, but that doesn’t happen much in the work of Kiki Smith. Her art emphasises inter-connectedness, not least between the human and the celestial. One of her largest works is a room-sized installation in which 26 cast glass animals – representing the constellations – sparkle and glow at viewers’ feet, so bringing the heavens down to earth, and encouraging us to meditate on the infinity of space and our human desire to know and tame it. Constellation (1996) isn’t in the show, but Sky (2012) depicts an equally direct communing with the stars. It’s a monumental tapestry, a form with medieval echoes, but actually at the cutting edge of technology. It’s part of a series based on multi-media collaged drawings, which are scanned for input to a computerised Jacquard loom. That unifies the components – a woman floating over mountains, keeping company with birds and stars – by making them entirely of warp and weft threads. Skye Sherwin has described the new age sensibility of Sky as ‘a typically personal layer cake of art history, myth, female identity and nature’, adding that ‘the split between the underworld, earth and heavens recalls the cosmology of the Celts, Native and Central Americans. Its floating nude might be a sprite, a spirit or a goddess.’ (The Guardian, Feb 2017). Smith says that her ‘original intent in making tapestries was to mix up the Middle Ages and the Roaring Twenties and hippy art to make images that were spectacle’. Hence the glow references the gleaming lights of RKO Pictures, one of the major studios of Hollywood’s golden age. At the same time, the cast of plants, animals, and heavenly bodies in this body of work suggests ‘how imperative it is at this moment to celebrate and honor the wondrous and precarious nature of being here on earth.’

Sky could easily be taken to illustrate Carl Sagan’s famous proclamation that ‘The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.’ (from the 1980-81 TV series ‘Cosmos: A Personal Voyage’). That seems spiritually true in Smith’s tapestry, as well as literally true in the scientific sense that carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms in our bodies were created inside a star before Earth was born some 4.5 billion years ago. It’s appropriate, then, that Smith herself has tattoos of stars spaced along the backs of her arms and legs - in imitation of the Egyptian goddess of the sky, Nut, whose body stretched across the earth and was covered in stars.

*Standing Stars II* (2013) by Kiki Smith. Bronze, 39-1/4" x 27-1/2" (99.7 cm x 69.9 cm) © Kiki Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery

Standing Stars II connects above and below in a different manner: the sculpture can be read as stars connected to the earth; or as trees, the foliage of which takes the form of stars. Either way, the celestial and the arboreal comes into conjunction, consistent with Smith’s world of equality between all things: human, animal, vegetal, cosmic … Given her interest in myth, one might also think of how, in ancient Sanskrit astrology, every person belongs to any one of the 27 ‘nakshatras’ – or zones of stars – which are correspondingly correlated to 27 trees on Earth. Those 27 zones have to incorporate a multitude of stars: modern estimates suggest that the Milky Way alone has up to 400 billion. Yet there would be no shortage of trees to correlate with that. NASA has estimated there to be three trillion trees on the planet (Nature, 2015). Climate change activists would like to see that increase: the target of an extra trillion has been cited as likely to make a worthwhile difference (see, for example, the policy of the pressure group ‘Plant for the Planet’). Smith’s works bring people, trees and the universe together.

Switzerland-based Moroccan artist Latifa Echakhch has recently raised her sights to the skies and on up into the heavens. The Sunset Down series from 2022 captures a vivid sunset over a mountain. The romantic convention is undermined, however, as only fragments of the painted scene are intact, while large portions appear to be missing – scratched and abraded with vigorous gestures, unveiling a rough under-layer of concrete. The void starts to take priority over the image. Sunset Down forms part of an ongoing stream of work that explores the fragility of representation. In Echakhch’s words: ‘Frescoes usually depict landscapes, views of the skies, angels and glorifying images of people. Frescoes present images with which people can identify and rally in the hope of a common unity. Showing the fragility of the process of representation is a way to underline the limitations of being together, while also making us more aware of it.’

After painting the skies, Echakhch moved on to Outer Space, inspired by images from NASA’s 2021-launched Webb Space Telescope. In The All (2023), she explains, ‘rather than just depicting what is above and around us, the images also show the state of the universe across time. By the time the light has travelled from certain stars, several billions of years will have passed. All we see is not “ici et maintenant”. Here again, I used a fresco technique. Reproducing an image through a simple painting gesture transforms it into a pattern. The paintings are realized in the simplest way to make them understandable. After which, part of the surface is removed by damaging it as if it could have been due to a process of violent aging. Surfaces are taken off until the erased image is still understandable and in a way, even stronger. The resulting effect is as if the image materializes more than it would have in reality’. That picks up on her theme of the ‘fragility of representation’, but also acts as a concrete means of reminding us of the age which is already incorporated in the source images.

We might spell out how everything we see beyond earth is in the past, significantly so once we look beyond the solar system. Light reflected from the moon reaches us in little more than a second; the sun’s rays take just over 8 minutes; we’re 4.4 light years from our second-nearest star – Alpha Centauri – which is some 25 trillion miles away; the Orion Nebula, the brightest star in our neighbour system, is 1,500 light years away. Beyond that, the times required for light to reach us soon stretch past human history into the geological. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across; what we’re seeing of our neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy is what was there 2m years ago; if we can see more distant universes, they will appear as they were before the earth was formed – the observable universe is a sphere with a diameter of some 93 billion light years.

*Cosmos IX* (1990-92) by Richard Pousette-Dart. Acrylic on board, 16-1/8" × 16-1/8" × 3/8" (41 cm × 41 cm × 1 cm), diameter © Estate of Richard Pousette–Dart / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In the absence of a horizon, one might feel that Richard Pousette-Dart’s tondo Cosmos IX also moves beyond the Earth – and it is one of many ‘celestial abstractions’ that the American artist (1916-92) made from the early sixties onwards, in tandem with the golden age of manned space exploration. Pousette-Dart, youngest of the founders of the New York school, was pictured in Nina Leen's iconic ‘Irascibles’ photo of the abstract expressionists for Life Magazine in 1951. He soon left New York City for upstate Rockland, however, and by the mid-fifties he had developed his own characteristic manner of building paintings up through myriad small, heavily textured dabs of colour, often eschewing the brush to make those marks directly from the tube. Pousette-Dart was inspired by photography, stating that it revealed how ‘all form is made up of so many points of light and that everything has a molecular structure … I’m concerned with form and the nature of light, and I find that I can achieve variations in form through many touches of the brush in a way that I can’t with a single stroke of the brush.’ The results accrue an other-worldly vibe. Pousette-Dart said, ‘I strive to express the spiritual nature of the universe. Painting for me is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real’. Yet the physical presence of the paint, emphasised by its impasto application, contradicts that – we are reminded of the physical just as we are drawn into the metaphysical.

That leaves the question of to what extent his paintings can be said to represent actual cosmic phenomena. Cosmos IX conveys the grandeur of a starry night, but does so through a kaleidoscopic patterning closer to a mandala than any view of the night sky. Imploding Black surely evokes a Black Hole. The first photographically-constructed image of that phenomenon, released in 2019, showed the M87 black hole can’t be seen, as its gravity is too strong to let light escape, but its presence can be inferred from the effects of its gravity on its surroundings: gas, dust, and debris that gets pulled in swirls around and heats up as it falls inward, creating an accretion disc – superheated gas and dust that whirls around the hole at immense speeds, producing electromagnetic radiation (X-rays, optical, radio) that reveals the hole’s location. Pousette-Dart’s version seems far gentler, as implosions go, suggesting a void that has relatively little effect on the astral matter surrounding it. Space Continuum, Part II (1989) applies adventurous colour to what might be taken as an anthology of cosmic phenomena, brought as the title suggests into a continuum that contrasts with the vast distances that actually apply, as set out above.

Evidently Pousette-Dart made abstract paintings which evoke the celestial, not representations in any literal sense. And that makes sense: he is essentially an abstract painter, not a science fiction illustrator. He gives us an environment of possibilities, not an environment as such. Lowery Stokes Sims, who organized the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1997 Pousette-Dart exhibition in New York, sees the vibrating optical effects as ‘the visual mediation of individual chromatic incidents congealing in our vision’ into what the artist saw as summoning ‘feeling / the living edge of form / created living form’. Pousette-Dart gives us the inner cosmos first, the outer universe second.

One would not normally place Jeff Koons in a scientific context: he’s known for his investigation of the intersection between consumerism and culture, most typically, perhaps, by taking kitsch to such a high end of production that it becomes an art that cleverly merges homage with critique – as in the super-shiny balloon dogs, Valentine hearts, diamonds, and Easter eggs of the ‘Celebration’ series (1994-2011). Over the past decade, Koons has produced many ‘gazing ball’ paintings: they operate by having his assistants repaint historic masterpieces, then adding a shelf emerging from the middle of the image. Koon places a large, blue glass bauble on each shelf – hand-blown to his orders, though they’re of a type popularised as garden ornaments. That means that viewers see themselves reflected in the perfectly shiny surface along with the famous painting. ‘This experience is about you,’ says Koons, ‘your desires, your interests, your participation, your relationship with this image’. Perhaps that has the potential to renew the impact of potentially over-familiar works. ‘These paintings in their own time were some of the greatest masterpieces in western art history’, he adds, ‘but in this time, this moment, they’re most powerful as they are in this state of gazing’.

*Gazing Ball (Bottlerack)* (2016) by Jeff Koons. Galvanized steel and glass, 36" × 15-15/16" × 15-15/16" (91.4 cm× 40.5 cm × 40.5 cm) © Jeff Koons

Yet something else is going on in Gazing Ball (Bottlerack) (2016), in which the ball is an addition to Marcel Duchamp’s famous readymade. For one thing, this was not – in Duchamp’s term – ‘retinal art’, it’s more about idea than image. Second, the gazing ball can be naturally integrated into the work: there’s no need to build a shelf. Put those factors together, and Koons’ version operates more as an object in itself. It will reflect the viewer, but we might see it more as reflecting on Koons himself, given his own proclivity for turning non-art objects into art – albeit, as here, he remakes rather than simply re-presenting them. In its raised placement, and in the context of this show, the ball becomes planetary – is ours not the blue planet? The conjunction of planetary and readymade echoes another famous conceptual work: Piero Manzoni’s The Base of The World, Homage to Galileo (1961), for which the Italian artist took a plinth and turned it upside down to declare the entire world to be a work of art. Perhaps it’s not the Earth, but the universe that is the ultimate readymade. And that truly is vast: those 400 billion stars of the Milky Way likely make it a typically populated galaxy, and there are estimated to be two trillion galaxies in the known universe – which is just a faction of the whole … (Brian Cox in ‘The Independent’, July 2022). That’s the potential contrast Koons sets up with the quotidian bottle rack. Consistent with that, Koons has said that the gazing ball ‘represents the vastness of the universe and at the same time the intimacy of right here, right now’. Or, to put it another way, outer universe and inner cosmos.

‘Inner Cosmos, Outer Universe’ is on show at Pace Gallery, Geneva, 15 March – 4 May 2024

INNER COSMOS, OUTER UNIVERSE