Life Death Love Hate Pleasure Pain 1983

Bruce Nauman made this piece, "Life Death Love Hate Pleasure Pain," out of neon tubing. Isn’t it amazing how he's taken these huge, heavy concepts and made them so immediate? I love how the colours pop, that electric buzz you get from neon. And the way the words are arranged in a circle, it’s like they're chasing each other, no beginning or end, just this constant loop of feeling. You know, the way the pink of "PAIN" kinda bleeds into the green of "PLEASURE" is so smart. It reminds me that things aren’t black and white, but always shifting and mixing. Nauman’s playing with language and how it affects us. It's like he’s taken the stuff of everyday life – our emotions, our experiences – and turned it into something you can literally see glowing in the dark. It’s that feeling of the infinite, that eternal cycle that all painters, including me, are obsessed with.