Heightened light sensitivity

Olafur ELIASSON went to art school in Copenhagen, considers Reykjavik to be home and has his studio in Berlin. He might be a quintessential citizen of New Europe but spiritually he is a Los Angeles artist.

The 10 works in Eliasson’s captivating new exhibition in Pasadena employ light, space, color, perceptual events that include transparency and reflection, and an acute consideration of architectural and natural environments as frames for human experience. Robert Irwin, whose revolutionary work has set the highest standard for Light and Space art since the 1960s, is his primogenitor. And the collective precedent will be found in the diverse sculptures and environments made here during the last 40 years by Larry Bell, Maria Nordman, James Turrell, Doug Wheeler and other such artists.

The Pasadena exhibition is a marvel. As always with Eliasson, it reasserts a basic proposition of Light and Space art. Simply put: Our perception and understanding of objects and events are the foundation of reality; things do not exist outside of human consciousness.

Phenomenology, in short, is the wellspring from which this art flows. This year marks the centennial of that movement’s breakthrough in the writing of philosopher Edmund Husserl, but Eliasson is not just restating established principles in his art. Instead, he puts them to work.

The show is a project of Emi Fontana Gallery in Milan, Italy, and marks the first in a planned series in L.A. under the umbrella name, West of Rome. Titled “Meant to be lived in,” the inaugural show is installed for a month inside a private home, emptied for the occasion, rather than in an art gallery. (The house is open to the public four days a week.) L.A.’s suburban sprawl, which became the global model that replaced the urbanism of old, is a distinctive mix of private and public experience that Eliasson’s choice of venue exploits.

Built five years ago, the 2,000 square-foot hillside house is neo-Modernist in style. A semi-transparent shoebox is set atop a pair of 84-foot-long steel beams that span two massive concrete piers. Think of it as a squared-off cousin to John Lautner’s famous “flying saucer” house on a pole in the Hollywood Hills, dubbed the Chemosphere; architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena were restoring Lautner’s signature building at the time they designed and built the Pasadena home. Both residences are held aloft like an offering to the sky, with one edge lightly skimming the terrain.

Sheathed in glass walls and open to views that extend to the far horizon, the house is a striking platform for an airy, ethereal perceptual drama. So the first thing Eliasson did was cover the windows.

The home’s white-walled interior was painted mostly black, and interlocking black tiles covered the blond-wood floors. Looking outward was replaced by looking inward.

Enter the house and almost immediately you are confronted by what appears to be another doorway, covered in glass. You are reflected, but your reflection is divided -- doubled, tripled and quadrupled -- overlapping in the faintly orange light and fading into vapor. It’s as if you have become Elvis in one of Andy Warhol’s famous silk-screen paintings.

Examine this uncanny phantasm for a moment, and the source of the mysterious effect is soon revealed. Ambient light from an illuminated sculpture nearby skims across layers of glass set in a deep wooden frame. The execution of the work is simplicity itself.

Every installation inside the house is like that: Sculptures employing light, mirrors, glass, prisms, transparent plastic and other such materials create captivating visual displays that at first blush seem like magic. In no time flat, however, you discover that the artist has been careful to expose their origins and machinery.

There are no tricks in this fun-house hall of mirrors. No hidden gimmicks or secret stratagems are designed to lead you astray. Inside this shining domicile on a hill, Eliasson has established an interactive zone of mutual trust and generosity.

One of the show’s most extraordinary moments comes in a work made from a theatrical arc light, whose narrowed beam is directed at a small, mirrored ring suspended from the ceiling. Visually, the optical event is something like a lunar eclipse crossed with a solar flare.

Like all of Eliasson’s installations, the effect requires some describing. The ring is attached to a motor, so that it rotates slowly in the center of the room. The theatrical lamp projects a luminous disk and blackened shadow on the opposite wall of the darkened space. As the suspended ring turns, a reflected arc of light seems to grow from inside the core of the luminous disk.

This curved, ballooning line of light sweeps across the floor, ceiling and walls (eventually including the wall behind you), before returning from whence it came, within the radiance of the shaded, glowing disk. Slowly it reemerges -- again and again -- to repeat its perpetual trajectory around the room.

What’s most enchanting is the way the arc of light seems to reach out and envelope spectators standing in the room. Within its gentle curve you are ensnared in an endless cycle of darkness and light. The playful effect is lighthearted, yet strangely moving.

Enthusiastic cheers greeted Eliasson’s installation in the enormous Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern last year, and the hosannas resonated across the Atlantic. Even without having seen that work we can learn something about what he’s up to in this modest Pasadena house.

Prior artists invited to create a work for the Tate’s gargantuan space inside an abandoned power station -- 500 feet long, 75 feet wide and 115 feet tall -- have sought to humanize its dizzying scale, to bring it down and make it more manageable. Eliasson went the other way. He made the colossus seem even larger.

He did it the way magicians do -- with smoke and mirrors. Titled “The Weather,” the piece consisted of a mirrored ceiling, a fog machine and a big half-disk of translucent plastic in front of 200 bright yellow light-bulbs set high on the end wall. The mirrored ceiling completed the illusion of a full circle of glowing light, like a spectral sun shimmering above, while the fog made the massive side walls seem less solid.

Eliasson made an epic illusion of a life-source. Unlike the carnival charlatans that crowd our modern media landscape, however, he did not use smoke and mirrors to dissemble. Those cards got laid on the table, for everyone to see -- and people came in droves to commune in a state of intimate, heightened sensitivity.

Social, political and cultural implications attend an aesthetic choice like that. In the Pasadena house, Eliasson’s glancing reference to Warhol’s Elvis paintings is not accidental. Los Angeles is the epicenter of the pop universe, and the theatrical illusions that define our world are further ratcheted up by the repeated use of arc lamps, suitable for a Hollywood spectacular.

With “Meant to be lived in” Eliasson has turned a semi-transparent house into a modern Plato’s cave -- but with a distinctive, liberating difference. In the allegory of the cave, Plato warned against mistaking appearance for reality: Prisoners witnessed the spellbinding play of magical shadows and haunting echoes cast by objects that were hidden from them. In the experience Eliasson has created in the house, we turn to look at the source of the dazzling light.

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Olafur Eliasson, ‘Meant to be lived in’

Where: 1472 Inverness Drive, Pasadena

When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; noon to 5 p.m. Sundays

Ends: May 31

Price: Free, but limited parking