Leo Villareal is a Mexican American light artist who was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. However, he’s spent much of his time on the east coast near New York City and traveling the globe to create art. His career can be said to have started when he attended college. He graduated Yale in 1990 with degrees in sculpture and set design. He continued his post graduate education at New York University in interactive telecommunications. He used his knowledge to attain an internship with Microsoft. There, he was able to develop his software skills which he would eventually use in his art.
The core components of his art are software and LED lights. He has a fascination with binary code and patterns. So he uses his custom software to control thousands of LED lights in each of his works. He likes bridging the gap between ones and zeroes and the world around us. He’s able to use these new technologies in conjunction with inspirations of past artists. Andrea Inselmann, a Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, describes this well saying, “Villareal’s works reinterpret fundamental components of such 20th century art movements as pop, minimalism, conceptual, and post-painterly abstraction while responding to ingenuity and imagination that defines technology in the 21st century.”
Villareal has four main types of installations: urban, academic, architectural, and residential. The Illuminated River (2021) was a project involving the bridges along the Thames in London, United Kingdom. He lit up a total of nine bridges with subtly moving LED light sequences. He initially did four in 2019 and completed five more by 2021. The goal was to highlight the existing architecture of the bridges that would otherwise be hidden in the night as well as bring new color and life to the city.
Cosmos (2012) is one of his academic pieces. It is at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The purpose of the art is to pay homage to Carl Sagan, a Cornell astronomy professor. He used 12,000 LEDs and used his computer software to explore the movement and patterns associated with the sky.
Point Cloud (2019) is on a bridge as the Moscone Center and is an example of one of his architectural pieces. He used 858 steel rods on the roof of the bridge with 28,288 individually programmed LED bulbs. These LEDs change colors up to thirty times per second.
He also had a residential exhibition at the Pace Gallery in London, United Kingdom. It included 6 single panel pieces from the Instance series (2018), Corona (2018), and a triptych of OLED screens. At the center of the exhibition was Detector (2019) which was over 10 meters long and had LEDs creating star-like patterns using layered sequential logic systems. He’s able to do this using his custom programming.
Through his art we can see a few different themes and what he really focuses on. First and foremost, he explores movement in all of his pieces. He focuses on using sequences and programs to make patterns that are constantly moving in unpredictable ways. He uses physics and math to create these abstract images and likes how abstract it is saying, “There’s nothing to get. But that’s somehow very powerful.” Other themes throughout his work are: astronomy, which can be seen in Cosmos, his exhibition at Pace Gallery, and Star Ceiling, and color, which can be seen in Illuminated River (2021), Point Cloud (2019), and Field (2007).
Sources:
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/leo-villareal-30981
https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/leo-villareal-3/
https://museum.cornell.edu/exhibitions/leo-villareal-cosmos#:~:text=An%20homage%20to%20the%20late,)%20and%20computer%2Ddriven%20imagery.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP9JCeckupw