Lightcraft III

About Lightcraft III
Put another way, there is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it – from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons – are also only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is iterally beyond both space and time.
Michel Talbot

LIGHTCRAFT arrives unconspicuously to its third edition. Step by step, a delicate and simultaneously problematizing approximation to the arts of Light is defining a specific territory of revelations. It is as if the Palace would be charting ‘Lights to Come’, uncovering yet another trait of its drive for Contemporaneity.

Let’s face it. This doesn’t happen everyday. Neither every year for that matter. Belmonte is a turnpike of creative visions and artistic experiments, but it is exceptionally rewarding to host an artist duo who is shining their light in countless Festivals worldwide. Joachim Slugocki and Kasia Malejka started this cooperative urban intervention aesthetic almost a decade ago in their hometown – Torun – in fact, in the second edition of the Light Festival SKYWAY. Now, Palácio Belmonte is proudly hosting possibly the last work of this series, just before the duo moves into other directions.

A few words contextualizing this years’ programme. These artists’ works are always realised in direct response to the architecture they interrupt and comment. Their precise and conceptually clear model for interpelating the place is paradoxically both the sign of an alien presence and an easily recognisable geometric order expanding the character of the very space. Colour is part of the language – a psychedelic palette revealing a disturbing, yet mesmerising aspect of artificial illumination. In the end, the performance of perception is triggered by the drawing composition. The spectator’s vision becomes the informal and playful resonance of these moving strings’ material life.

SPECTRAL is the name of this new work by Kasjo Studio, a large place-specific project for the Belmonte Patio, the iconic urban gem located in Castelo. It is accompanied by the presentation of 16 small-scale paintings in the Cultural Café and a nano-scale intervention at a door (n. 16 – what a wonderful coincidence) leading to the tunnel. This latter work consists in a line of green light that, hitting the dark floor, disperses in all directions. Fluorescent dots of light.  We may then try to understand what this light is made of (Painting? Video?), but soon what’s at stake is our will and capacity to enter a new world of abstract events, Kasjo’s cosmos. This is an art courting the weight of the world only to tear it apart like an holographic incision.