Lux Principum

Galleria Raffaella Cortese in the space of Albisola Superiore presents together with Fanta-MLN the work of Noah Barker, beginning a collaboration with a younger generation of artists and galleries. Once a year, from the beginning of spring until the end of summer, an artist will be invited to think of a work for this very special place.

In Albisola Noah Barker presents lux principum (2023), a light constructed of marine grade stainless steel supplemented with an annotated design manual. The new work is intended for consultation by a potential sovereign seeking guidance in the medieval genre of “mirror for princes”. In substituting the furnishing of reflection for illumination, the light accounts for political structure in western democracies today.

Lighting, screens, and reflective murals are frequent in Barker’s work, raising questions of attention and perception in the construction of aesthetic sensibility. In Albisola Barker has produced a work that is to be looked at as well as from. Viewed from the street, its structure and illuminated volumes are suspended between model and formal exercise. While in the gallery, a book developed through recent publicly accessible artificial intelligence maps onto the composition questions beleaguering our parliaments. These incongruent experiences of the work make the light an apparatus of projection and reason.

This publication is an addendum and design guide for the light Lux Principum. Six rotating elevation diagrams illustrate a language model generated text. The publication's cover design has been adapted from The Newtonian system of the world, the best model of government: an allegorical poem. With a plain and intelligible account of the system of the world, by way of annotations: with copper plates, an eighteenth century celebration of the mechanical universe by J.T. Desaguliers. Where Desaguliers is addressed to the Duke of Earl on its opening page, Barker's book is enigmatically dedicated "To Mario" on its last.

About the Artist

Noah Barker (California, 1991) is an artist based in New York. Recent exhibitions include Halle fur Kunst Steiermark, Graz (2023); Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2022); Fluentum, Berlin (2022); Progetto, Lecce (2021); MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2021); Alienze, Vienna (2021); Löwengasse, Cologne (2021); Fanta-MLN, Milan, (2020 and 2019); Air de Paris, Paris (2019); Lodos, Mexico City, MX (2019).

Writing is a parallel activity that has appeared in exhibition catalogues such as Schreibtischuhr edited by Liam Gillick and Autoreduction edited by Dora Budor as well as art publications May Revue, Texte zur Kunst, Mousse, and Cura.