LUMINOUS SEQUENCES (1967)

In the project drawings for the Fantastic City, created in the 1960s, one discovers Piero Fogliati’s desire to create a Temple of Light: a building conceived to capture sunlight and shape it into a three‑dimensional luminous sculpture. To bring this vision into being, Fogliati designed several devices, many of which were never physically realized but survive in a number of his project drawings from those years. The work that most fully translated this idea into an artwork is Fotostruttura (1968), although within this same field of research the Successioni Luminose achieved another significant result in the creation of a three‑dimensional light sculpture.

The work consists of a special projector, designed by the artist, that generates a light which appears white but is in fact composed of a rapid sequence of luminous forms, following one another at such high speed as to be imperceptible to direct vision. The work also includes a vertical aluminum disc, painted white and rotating rapidly on its axis. When the projector illuminates the disc, its movement interacts with the light created by the artist, producing a surprising effect: the viewer has the sensation that the physical laws of matter are being overturned and that the very perception of the disc is transformed.

The resulting optical illusion makes the disc appear deformed, twisted, and multiplied into three simultaneously intersecting versions. In reality, the physical structure of the disc does not change; it is the luminous phenomenon that creates the impression of a three‑dimensional light sculpture—a kind of white flower whose form and number of “petals” continuously shift, a luminous succession expanding and contracting.

With this work, Fogliati does not use light merely to illuminate a space or an object; he shapes it as a plastic material, like marble or wood, giving life to a true three‑dimensional luminous sculpture—an immaterial flower, a breath of light that expands and dissolves.