Light Progressions 1993

Curator: Well, this certainly demands a moment. There’s something both clinical and oddly comforting about the light in this room. Editor: Indeed. What you’re observing is "Light Progressions," a site-specific installation from 1993 by the Italian artist Nanda Vigo. Notice how she orchestrates a dialogue between geometric shapes and fields of radiant color, creating an immersive environment. Curator: Immersive is the word. The light appears to be almost manufactured, flat even; each form projects like an emissive screen hovering within the architecture. Are those actually paintings, or is the wall itself somehow… modified? Editor: The answer lies in how Vigo treats light as a palpable substance. By contrasting a harsh rectangular frame with the fluid emanation of light, she constructs a binary tension within each plane. You’re not just observing; you're participating in a carefully structured phenomenological experience. Curator: Phenomenology then. The light in this context becomes something that feels regulatory, a signal. Was Vigo involved with stage design or architecture? Editor: Significantly, yes. Her collaboration with architects and designers in the 1960s, her forays into furniture, TV sets—this interest permeates "Light Progressions." Think of the almost corporate, clinical manipulation of interior space to stimulate a kind of placid consumerism, of progress as pure display. Curator: A reading with surprising social awareness perhaps; still, I’m captivated by her orchestration of color. The contrast creates depth without reliance on traditional perspective—it really disrupts our customary reading of space. Editor: Quite so. It encourages the kind of careful consideration of surfaces as signs and challenges our presumptions about vision and constructed spaces, and how we behave in them. Curator: Thinking about all of this really does shift our awareness and demands new attention. Editor: Yes. I appreciate how even seemingly simple structures, viewed closely, reveal unexpected critical textures, which force us to reconsider their surrounding context.