For his first exhibition since joining Lisson Gallery, Hiroshi Sugimoto presents a new series of large-scale photographic prints, collectively titled Opticks, which rely on a prism to split ‘white’ light into its seven constituent colors and many more gradations and shades in between. Through the revelation of this hidden, polychromatic world that exists all around us, Sugimoto simultaneously creates stunning, abstract compositions worthy of modernist painting, despite each image depicting an entirely natural phenomenon. Sugimoto not only follows in the footsteps of Isaac Newton, who published his work Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light in 1704, but also realigns his practice from a photographer of black- and-white fields, forms and figures, towards a scientific surveyor of blazing color and invisible possibility.
Read more“These are the first color photographs I have made. With the help of my prism, I created rainbows in the room and shot them every morning. I entered into this zone of light and shadow, while recreating the feeling of shock and surprise that Newton must have felt. This light had no shape or form. In a certain sense, it was pure. These were gradations of light that emerged out of the darkness and began to shift. Nothing is in focus, so there is this feeling of ecstasy or rapture.”
Beginning with a series of Polaroids after being gifted the last Japanese batch of the film in 2009, Sugimoto isolated sections of visible, spectral light using a prism set up at home, often focusing on the edges where these glowing patches emerged or returned to darkness. For the first time, Sugimoto will present this prism apparatus in the space of this show, positioned to capture the light from the gallery's skylight at certain moments throughout the day. He also further split the beam of light using a mirror that he could rotate, in order to expand each color into further variations of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, even introducing second, third or more colors into a single image. After contemplating and finessing his studies for a decade, Sugimoto only began to scan and enlarge the Opticks to make unique C-prints in 2018.
“Why must science always cut up the whole into little pieces when it identifies specific attributes? The world is filled with countless colors, so why did natural science insist on just seven? I seem to get a truer sense of the world from those disregarded intracolors. Does not art serve to retrieve what falls through the cracks, now that scientific knowledge no longer needs a God?”
The show’s title, ‘Optical Allusion,’ relates to the idea that photography is ultimately a subjective version of the truth, given that every individual perceives color differently, whether physiologically or culturally. It also ‘alludes’ to the similarities between the scale, ambition and immersion of these photographic works with those of pioneering modernist abstractionists and contemporary color field painters. Ultimately, Sugimoto is depicting not only emotional states of mind but also intangible, otherworldly spectacles – abstract effects which he claims could even be achieved on another planet, independent of our earthly atmosphere, materials or landscapes.
“All my life I have made a habit of never believing my eyes – there has never been any guarantee that what I see is actually there.”
A room dedicated to the Opticks series forms the culmination of Sugimoto’s major retrospective exhibition, ‘Time Machine’, which was first staged at Hayward Gallery, London (October 11, 2023 – Jan 7, 2024) and has now toured to UCCA Beijing (until June 23, 2024).
