Leo Villareal: Recent Works

Leo Villareal explores the potency of light. He creates complex patterns of light-emitting diodes (LED) based on simple rules and encoded programming. While mathematical in origin, these pixels and patterns act as personalities that develop into something organic. By building sequences and defining the conditions the artist creates an immersive experience defined by light.
 
Applying principals ranging from the computer game Pong to Newton’s Law of Acceleration and Velocity, Villareal defines a field in which something can occur.
Whether it is the use of plexiglass tubes to diffuse light to a subtle palette reminiscent of a horizon, or the transformation of the façade of a building that wraps the urban activity of a city in abstract light, or a geometric grid with points of light playfully interacting, each installation takes advantage of the relationships and movement of light within a space.
 
Born in 1967 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the artist received a computer from his father at the age of thirteen and experimented with graphics, but as the computer’s capabilities were limited, he soon lost interest. Following graduation from Yale University in 1990, Villareal was drawn back to computers as the wave of virtual reality entered technology, and he enrolled at New York University in the Interactive Telecommunications Program. Afterwards, he joined a think tank in Palo Alto, California at the International Research Corporation where he was immersed in an environment rich with ideas generated by artists, engineers, musicians and computer technologists. 
 
Villareal finds inspiration in a variety of sources, and his work is a reformulation of these influences. Early in his career, the artist was taken with the work of British mathematician James Conway. Conway’s Game of Life was a computer simulation of life and death of cells that encouraged the artist’s burgeoning interest in computer-generated light as an art form. In terms of other artists, Villareal is more drawn to those artists, such as Sol Lewitt, who demonstrate the use of systems, rules and structure in their work than to other light artists. Finally, his works find strong parallels in the musical environment as his light sculptures employ the same compositional procedure of the building up and breaking down of patterns as found within the writing of music.
 
Villareal’s work is in the permanent collection of such museums as the National Gallery of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. His installation for the new Tampa Museum of Art, Sky (Tampa) is his largest to date and is on view each evening beginning at sundown.
 

 
Image:

Leo Villareal (American, born 1967)
Solaris, 2005/2010
Light emitting diodes, microcontroller, custom software, Plexiglas, and wood
Courtesy of the artist and Conner Contemporary  Art