So has the study of natural light become less relevant in our neon age? Olafur Eliasson's Domadalur series explore the changing effect of light on landscape just as Monet explored this theme 100 years previously in his Haystacks and Rouen Cathedral series (good article here). As the light changes colour shifts become heightened, in both instances this is highlighted through repetition: a tactic more usually associated with contemporary art than impressionism. Eliasson's explorations through installation go further into our experience of light to transcendent effect, for instance in the Weather Project at the Tate Modern. This was truly a sublime experience, visitors prostrating themselves to the illusion of this hypnotic sun. It seems photography's obsession with light diminished as colour became an accepted medium but as Eliasson observes:-
"Even though one of the largest intercultural common constructions is the agreement about what color is what color (time being the all time largest !), there is still a very large portion of individual opinion about color (unlike time). Color has in its abstraction an enormous psychological and associative potential, and even though color has been cultivated to the extreme the amount of individuality in experiencing colors is equally extreme.This points to that color doesn’t exist in itself, but only when looked at. The unique fact that color so to speak only materializes when light bounces off it into our retinal circus shows us that analyzing colors is in fact about the ability to analyze ourselves."
"Even though one of the largest intercultural common constructions is the agreement about what color is what color (time being the all time largest !), there is still a very large portion of individual opinion about color (unlike time). Color has in its abstraction an enormous psychological and associative potential, and even though color has been cultivated to the extreme the amount of individuality in experiencing colors is equally extreme.This points to that color doesn’t exist in itself, but only when looked at. The unique fact that color so to speak only materializes when light bounces off it into our retinal circus shows us that analyzing colors is in fact about the ability to analyze ourselves."
