skylight

paula braga

It’s intriguing to think that the points of light we see in the sky on a starry night originate from objects that perhaps no longer even exist. The light has travelled for a long time and arrived here, but the celestial body from which it was emitted, in the meantime, may have vanished. The light is just a sign that there used to be a star there. Used to be. The light is like an echo. It reaches our body bringing news from another body, from another time.

       Estela Sokol builds objects that naturally emit light-colour, without any wires, batteries or lamps. This is pure colour that lights up, indicating that within a black object there is a yellow interior that projects a kind of aura of the object on to the wall. Looking at these sculptures entails looking beyond the area of their outer surfaces. One must observe the effect on the world caused by the pieces, and thus perceive the almost always hidden interior, which makes itself known by changing the colour of the floor or nearby wall. What the artist does here with forceful, citrus and almost illuminous colours and black surfaces, is make explicit a phenomenon that is so discreet in other conditions that it remains disguised and unnoticed: the effect of one body on another, the interssection of colour and luminosity between two bodies and the result of this sum, overlapping or adjacence. Body can be understood here as a sculptural object, or as any other body that might have an aura, including the human body, that certainly emits light, which it crosses with the light from other human bodies.

       Estela Sokol’s studio is a laboratory for testing the degree of interference between one body and another, which always involves the use of light-colour to investigate the traces left by one body on another and the important consideration of time to understand these traces. What I mean is the traces of a thought that ocurred a few milliseconds ago. Star light is the trace of a sun from the past. So, is all we have just a projection, reflecting a moment in which something really happened? Is my perceptive watch always slow in relation to something unintelligible in real time?

       The sculptures resulting from Estela Sokol’s research – I even call the two-dimensional pieces sculpture because they are more like bodies than images – lead me to understand both the stars and my body as instances of one single, vast, general and unintelligible principle, which is a delay of the graspable in relation to a given happening in itself.

       The notion of colour as light and not as surface undertone is rare, but when it does appear it comes from glowing beacons in the history of art such as James Turrell, Dan Flavin and Hélio Oiticica, whose works ring out the unintelligible. Estela Sokol’s work throws back the light of these artists, continuing research into light-colour – a sign of something more – travelling in time until reaching our bodies.