This artist expresses his ideas in “light language”
His persistent fascinations with color, light, and “soft” architectures extended into the use of neon, spotlights, Murano glass, fire, plant life, mirror balls, and mechanical contraptions…
The filmmaker, sculptor, and light artist Cerith Wyn was born in the small village of Llanelli in South Wales, and developed a love of photography and clothing from his father, a tailor, at a young age. He was a part of the art-punk movement in the UK when he moved to London in the 70s, and moved in queer punk circles of extraordinary creatives carving out his own extraordinary talent.
Over the following years, he worked in several cinematic projects and contributed to several music videos most famously for post-punk groups like The Fall, Psychic TV, The Pet Shop Boys, and The Smiths.
He often merged his conceptual often more obscurantist ideas with structuralist motifs as seen in his own short films like “Still Life with Phrenology Head” (1979), “Epiphany” (1984), and “Degrees of Blindness” (1988) (starring a young Tilda Swinton) while navigating brilliantly between avant-garde, and often doctrinaire, art institutions like the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative and the underground pop and queer subcultures then emerging across England.
His work focuses on re-inventing the language and perceptions of the physical world while simultaneously transforming themselves through elaborate performances of self-invention. Although he is no nostalgic (in fact, Evans claims a strong affinity with Futurism), the artist’s appreciation for fashion, conversation, and the occasional, wit evokes the vanishing élan of the Edwardian dandy…wrote Erik Morse for Vogue, 31 Jan 23.
He turned from filmmaking to visual and conceptual art in the 1990s. He had moved beyond the moving image, and had began to create sculptures, installations, photographs and works on other media, using a diverse array of materials, including fireworks, chandeliers, neon lighting, and plants.
An unbroken paragraph from Marcel Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe (Sodom and Gomorrah, 1921–22), translated into Japanese.
In his work ‘No realm of thought...No field of vision’ Proust’s passage is about a fountain, showering translucent drops that are backlit by the sun in a glorious way. Signs become miniature sculptures; each linguistic element, made to be read but is illegible to most, begs to be admired for its form as well as its function. Every March, Evans travels to Japan to celebrate the month of his birth. Evidence of these trips and his intimacy with the country’s culture, particularly his fascination with Noh, the 14th century classical form of theatre that combines music and dance with masks and exquisite costumes, pervades much of his work.
Evans works in a variety of material, notably in neon, sound, photography, and in glass, creating site-specific commissions, large scale neon sculptures and displays of mobiles suspended through space challenging the viewer’s perspectives.
Most recognizable in Evans’s catalog are his neon light sculptures, which vary widely in size and shape from wall-length fractals and starbursts to small, minimalist grids. Their employment of negative space, layered light, and subtractive, natural light emphasizes the disappearance of the atmosphere around rendering an emotional as well as speculative experience for the viewers.