Will Copley

If “watching the sun rise feels very different to looking at a painting of the subject” as the artist describes, these oscillating claims to vividness in the reality of light and its representation, result in suspended, sensual moments of colour in his Light Paintings. In exploring that there’s no reality without light, let alone any possible representation of reality, these works are like playful sacraments, mystical and analytical. 

As in Dan Flavin’s icons and monuments constructed of light tubes, and James Turrell’s installation in the crater of a dormant volcano in Arizona – inspired by the Incas’ architecture, and seeking to create a “controlled environment for the contemplation of of light” – there’s a celestial engagement that comes from working with light, and for it. Will Copley uses colour as it manifests across both pigment and LED; making LED paintings on wood in an admixture of the material and immaterial. The boundaries between organic and artificial, subjective and objective are in motion in these contemplative works; you wonder what JMW Turner would make of these contemporary theatres of light.