A spatial neon sculpture environment located at Espace d’Art au Chateau de la Gardiole, Coaraze, France – Permanent collection. Supported by the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Paris
DOUBLE ARCH – ELEMENTS X, (2026) by Anne Katrine Senstad
PRESS: The French MInistry of Culture
DOUBLE ARCH – ELEMENTS X, (2026) is conceived in specificity for a cavernous space defined by double arches, joined by a structurally concentric single column. Situated across two chambers on either side of the double arches, the installation is articulated as a vertical and horizontal structure where a single neon horizon envelopes a colonnade of luminous neon. Echoing the familiarity of architectural history, the art work re-composes and transforms inhabited space into an inverted double arch interceded by a parabolic horizontal arch formation composed by light and color. In ancient architecture, the arch represents the carrying, or load-bearing architectural arc, held together by compression, as do the columns of antiquity, revealing aesthetic value and structural necessity, stability, and strength. In mathematics, a parabola is a plane curve, approximately U shaped, where a parabolic arch allows for generous space that frames the viewer.
The structurally signifying facet of Senstad’s ELEMENTS series, is identified by a vertical light topology enveloped by a neon horizon, where the art work and the space it sits in become a totality, completing the poiesis of space into an art work. A taxonomy of spectra, neon tubes, transformers, exposed hardware, technology, transparent columns, arches, and raw stone, enunciate the artists aesthetic language. In scientific terms, light frequencies, color temperatures, noble gas particles, molecules, and electric currents effect the human body and our cognitive system. Senstad has meticulously composed the art work’s chroma and its structural components with these phenomena and elements in mind. The artist explores light’s potentialities in the encounter between luminosity and the experiential in pure form. The installation’s observational space is inhabited by spectrums of blue, pink, green, and yellow, that pursue what lies beyond gravity and matter.
Sitting on a locus, between experience and its presence, the installation emanates an awareness of space and ephemerality, one that resonates the presence of an embodied environment and the perceptual. Senstad’s art can be said to derive from the site where she works and creates, informed by the presence of spatiality. Here, in the caves of Château de la Gardiole, the artwork’s force accumulates balance between the site’s history and architectural characteristics, it’s double arches, and the sensoriality of light, color, and space.
Senstad’s practice is inspired by natural phenomena, the light and space movement, architecture, and land art. DOUBLE ARCH – ELEMENTS X lends its title from the chateau’s arched chambers and also draws reference to a unique natural rock formation in the Utah desert, where the entropy of time has shaped two massive double arches that share the same Navajo sandstone pillar that were formed by a vertical erosion of water some 190 million years ago. Fast forwarding millennia, the historic chateau stone walls and arched entryways suggest a threshold through enclosed voids and labyrinths, organized by harmony of structure that mark our passage of time, the transformational qualities inherent in the threshold – through entropy and ignition.
