Light is therefore colour, and shadow the privation of it.
What the Light Does When You Are Not Looking
In the rooms of Studio Trisorio, on the Riviera di Chiaia in Naples, a small LED illuminates a metal form mounted on the wall. The form is abstract: a shape somewhere between a seed and a spacecraft, closer to Brancusi than to anything identifiable. It could be a tensile sculpture. It could be an object from a dream. But what it does, when the light hits it, is project.
On the wall behind, an image appears. A globe. The Earth, seen from a distance no human eye has known without the mediation of a photograph. Italy is at the centre. Or perhaps the Middle East. Or the Americas. The image shifts depending on where you stand, and it is made entirely of shadow.
This is the work of Fabrizio Corneli. He has been making art from light for forty-five years, and in that time he has developed a practice so singular, so technically precise and yet so stubbornly unpredictable, that it resists almost every category the art world has to offer. He is not a light artist in the way James Turrell is a light artist. He is not a sculptor in any conventional sense. He is someone who builds objects that exist in order to produce images that are not there, images made of shadow, which is to say, of the absence of light.
Contemporary Art in the Galleries of Naples: Studio Trisorio
Studio Trisorio is one of Naples' most respected contemporary art galleries, with a programme that has included Louise Bourgeois, Daniel Buren, Jan Fabre, Jenny Holzer, Rebecca Horn, Martin Parr and Francesco Vezzoli. Founded in 1974, the gallery operates from three addresses in the city, and Corneli's current exhibition, La misura della luce, occupies two of them: the main space on Riviera di Chiaia and the gallery at Via Carlo Poerio 116.
It is a significant show in a city where contemporary art has deep roots and growing international visibility. Studio Trisorio has been part of that story for over fifty years, and its commitment to artists who work at the edge of perception, materiality and light makes it a natural home for Corneli's practice. The gallery is also the home of Artecinema, the international festival of film on contemporary art founded and directed by Laura Trisorio, which celebrated its thirtieth edition in October 2025 at the Teatro San Carlo and the Teatro Augusteo: thirty years of bringing art to the screen, and the screen to the city.
The works in the show span several typologies that Corneli has developed over the decades: shadow sculptures projected by LED, works with crystal spheres, egg-based installations, and a laminated piece installed in an exterior display window. Each uses a different relationship between light source, object and surface. Each produces an image that is, in a precise physical sense, not there.
The Measure of What Cannot Be Measured
Corneli speaks about his process with the precision of someone who has spent decades thinking about optics, geometry and the behaviour of photons. And yet what he says, again and again, is that what interests him most is what he cannot control.
"I try to define, approximately," he says. "But then the work itself comes alive through a whole series of strange behaviours of the light, short circuits, reflections, that I control very little."
This is the paradox at the centre of his practice. The initial design is rigorous: the size of the light source, the distance between metal and LED, the geometry of the form. These are calibrated with mathematical care. But the result, the shadow, the image, the way the light bends and bounces inside a crystal sphere, the reflections that create unexpected auras around a figure, is only partially his. The rest belongs to the light.
He describes a passage from a story he loves: a tale about a swan holding a stone in its beak, ready to drop it as a warning to the other swans when danger approaches. The whole story is about the tension of the threshold, the moment just before seeing, just before knowing. Corneli's work lives in that same threshold. The image is there, but it has to be found. Some visitors see it immediately. Others never do.
"Some people cannot read the glancing shadows as an image," he says. "They see the letters, the metal, other things. And then sometimes, after a long time, they find it."
Solar Works: When Art Keeps an Appointment with the Cosmos
Among all his bodies of work, Corneli speaks with particular affection about the solar installations, outdoor pieces where sunlight, rather than an artificial source, produces the shadow.
These are works that function as cosmic appointments. The image appears as Corneli designed it only once or twice a year, when the sun reaches a specific position in the sky. On the solstice, or near it, the shadow aligns. The rest of the time, the image drifts, deforms, disappears when clouds pass, and returns when the sky clears.
"They have a life of their own," he says. "I try to define them approximately, but then they do what they want."
There is something deeply moving about this. An artwork whose full expression depends on the rotation of the Earth. A sculpture that waits for June or December. A form that speaks only when the planet is in the right position, and then falls silent again. It is art as astronomy, as patience, as an act of trust in forces far larger than the artist.
The Recognisable and the Invisible: How Light Sculptures Shape Perception
Corneli is fascinated by recognisability, the deep human impulse to find familiar forms in what we see. Faces are the first shapes a child learns to read, followed by human figures, then letters, then maps. His work plays with this hierarchy of recognition, offering just enough visual information for the brain to begin assembling an image, and then withdrawing.
"The observer looks," he says, "and then, in times that are sometimes very long, some people never see anything. They cannot grasp the glancing shadows as an image."
This is not failure. It is the work functioning as intended. Corneli is not interested in clarity. He is interested in the edge between seeing and not seeing, in the moment when perception tips from abstraction into recognition and cannot go back. He describes a piece with a small candle and two profile portraits: no one has ever seen the faces immediately. They always see an architectural form first. Only later, sometimes much later, do the profiles emerge.
"Once you have focused on an image," he says, "it is very rare that you can reset and find another one."
It is a remark that says something about all art, and perhaps about all perception. The act of seeing is irreversible. Once you know what you are looking at, you cannot unknow it.
