Walking through the British-born, Belgian-based artist Ann Veronica Janssens’s latest sculpture show makes one aware of just how many dazzling ways light can refract. Some works at the gallery, Alfonso Artiaco, large-scale yellow-green planes that lean against a wall, shimmer iridescently, like oil slicks. Another work, a Blue Glass Roll 405/2 (2019) a large, blue-gray ring that radiates light softly like the surface of a frozen lake—on close inspection one can spy small bubbles of air trapped within the sculpture. 

These sculptures are the manifestation of a long artistic investigation: Since the late 1980s, Janssens’s practice has centered on light, color, and natural optical phenomena. In these pursuits, she’s developed a wide range of materials with which she experiments—glass, mirrors, aluminum, even artificial fog—which she shapes to manipulate Minimalistic motifs to create lustrous ranges of colors.

Installation view “Ann Veronica Janssens” 2020. Courtesy of Alfonso Artiaco.

“Her conscious use of light is driven by the desire to show reality in a different and unusual way,” said Alfonso Artiaco gallery in a statement. “Ann Veronica does not try to grasp the impalpable but instead chooses to experiment with its multiple forms and expressions… The sculpture becomes a place of perception. Consequently, the tools and the palette of her works are in constant change: they depend on the sensation and the experience perceived by each viewer.”

The exhibition consists of both new and older works, in dialogue. Along with mainly works in glass, the exhibition also includes a series of recent photos, “Five Lines of Pink in the Air, Randomly” (2020), which capture the cotton-candy pink streaks produced by clouds of both water vapor and artificial by-product left by airplanes. In another room, one comes across a gilded circular thatch sculpture, in which texture, color, light, and shape, come together in a metaphor of the earthly and cosmic.  

See images of “Ann Veronica Janssen” at Alfonso Artiaco, Naples, below.

Installation view “Ann Veronica Janssens” 2020. Courtesy of Alfonso Artiaco.

Installation view “Ann Veronica Janssens” 2020. Courtesy of Alfonso Artiaco.

Installation view “Ann Veronica Janssens” 2020. Courtesy of Alfonso Artiaco.

“Ann Veronica Janssen” is on view at Alfonso Artiaco, through February 27, 2021.