Communicating by Oscar Figueroa

One of the highlights of Oscar Figueroa’s exhibition Air Plane—now installed in the Art Condos Loading Dock—is this work titled Communicating.

It seems simple enough. A desk lamp, fitted with a red bulb, is positioned on the floor, near the wall. The lamp
Is turned up so that the light will be projected sideways. When the lamp is turned on, the flare from the light’s red bulb casts a red disc of light sideways onto the wall—low down so that the round red flare seems, mysteriously, to rest on the floor.

The piece succeeds, in large measure, because it does so much with so little—i.e. it gives back to the viewer infinitely more than the sum of the work’s actual parts. This, we think, is minimalism at its most refined and poetic.