Dan Flavin, Posthumously

Art in America, Oct, 2000 by Tiffany Bell

Typical of Muzio's work, Santa Maria in Chiesa Rossa melds Renaissance proportions with modernist simplicity. It is a large brick structure with a portico in front consisting of substantial columns supporting the pediment, some empty niches and a large arched clear-glass window over the entrance. Inside is a nave surmounted by a generous barrel vault supported by large but simple columns and flanked by side aisles; a transept separates the nave from a central apse behind the altar. With its rather severe design, classic proportions and lack of ornamentation, this building provides a good situation for Flavin's lights.

Declining health kept Flavin from visiting Milan as well, and he relied on photographs, videos and Morse's description to understand the site. One of the few surviving works Flavin designed for a building with a purpose other than the exhibition of art, the installation works in concert with the church's structure and very specific function. It elegantly and dramatically enhances the architecture and respects the purpose of the building.

Again, pink, yellow, blue, green and filtered ultraviolet lights are used in the installation. But here, color is contained in specific areas and remains pure within them. In the nave, along the edge where the columns meet the barrel vault, a horizontal row of 4-foot fixtures holding three lamps each--green and ultraviolet facing up; blue, attached to the side of the fixture, facing the center of the space--stretches from the entrance to the transept and washes the vault with aqua. At the same height, along the near wall of the transept, similar fixtures containing pink, ultraviolet and pink lamps form a line of soft color that reflects against the opposite wall. At both sides of the rounded apse, fixtures containing three lamps--yellow, yellow and ultraviolet--face away from the congregation and make a vertical line from the floor to the height of the other lights.

While the lights articulate architectural features, they also provide a panorama of color enveloping the entire church, that moves from the coolness of the green/blue to the warmth of pink and then yellow. Because of the large front windows and smaller openings along the side aisles and the end walls of the transept, the intensity of light and color is more pronounced at night. Changes in light coming through the windows over the course of the day give other dimensions to the work, linking it to the passage of time and to a specific place.

Serial variation in Marfa, unity of organization in Houston; light in tension with architecture at Marfa, light in harmony with it in Milan; color massed in oddly distorted spaces to intense expressive effect in Marfa, or sparsely disposed in serene, classical spaces in Houston and Milan: taken together, these late works demonstrate both the consistency of Flavin's practice over 33 years and the range of experience elicited by it. The placement of what may be Flavin's least "minimal" work in the context of Judd's serious-minded, coolly beautiful Chinati installations might indicate a bit of humor, while the awesome beauty of the church lights might indeed, despite Flavin's protestations, suggest some kind of spirituality.