Adrien Lucca (born 1983 in Paris, FR – lives and works in Brussels, BE) is a professor at the National school for visual arts La Cambre in Brussels. For about 10 years he’s developing an artistic practice around the topics of natural and artificial light, colour and perception, a transdisciplinary practice where the artistic experimentation and the scientific method are intertwined. In 2015 he founded the Studio Adrien Lucca, a company that produces monumental artworks in the public space using various media: Soleil de minuit (permanent stained-glass installation, Montreal, 2017), Microkosmos (permanent wall painting and artificial light installation, Brussels, 2018), Dentelles de lumière – allégorie de la recherche (permanent glass painting installation, Rome, 2018), Yellow-free zone (artificial light installation, Rotterdam, 2018).
After A White Room Without Yellow (LMNO Gallery, 2018), Yellow-free zone (Rotterdam, 2018) and Zone sans jaune (ARCO Madrid, 2019), Yellow zone / yellow-free zone, is the latest of a series of installations that explore the characteristics of a special artificial white light that modifies the perception of colours.
YZ / YFZ, a light experiment presented in the Gym of Whitehouse Gallery, produced in collaboration with LMNO Gallery, is made of two sources of artificial white light and of some coloured inflatable balloons that can be moved by the visitors. On one side of the room – the “yellow zone” – the white light is produced by a mixture of red, green and blue lights. On the other side – the “yellow-free zone” – the light appears identically white but contains no green and no blue lights, but only red and cyan. Surprisingly, in this zone the yellow objects appear of another colour. A primary yellow becomes bright red-orange, lemon-yellow objects turn pink or beige, yellowish-greens become brown, orange objects are almost purely red.
For human beings having a so-called “normal” colour vision – i.e. about 95% of the entire human population –, when I say “white” for a light, I say that when the light illuminates a white wall, the white wall appears white. YZ / YFZ invites the visitors to experience the almost magical effect of a special white light that counter-intuitively transforms the colours of everyday objects, including on the visitor’s bodies: the colours of their eyes, of their skin and of their clothes.
