Chris Levine is a British artist known for his pioneering work with light, portraiture, and immersive installations that explore perception, stillness, and states of heightened awareness. Over the past decades, he has developed a distinctive visual language in which light is not just a medium but an active presence shaping how we experience time, space, and consciousness. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, where he presented Higher Power – a large-scale light installation that reflects his ongoing interest in minimal form and expansive experiential impact.
Across your work – from portraits and immersive installations to monumental public interventions like Higher Power – light seems to become far more than a visual phenomenon. It begins to function almost as a philosophical language, a way of thinking about consciousness, perception, and human connection. How would you describe your own relationship with light, and what continues to draw you toward it as both a material and an idea?
We are beings of light, everything is consciousness and it’s all frequency and vibration. My fascination with laser since art school child, is to do with the fact that its a very pure form of light, a clean tone, something that we don’t really experience day to day. By tuning into that pure sensory signal, it can help us penetrate the noise and enter a meditative space. My work is all about inviting people into that space, the space between thought at which point we recalibrate and heal. The huge benefits of meditation are now well documented in science.
How did the original idea for Higher Power emerge? Was there a specific image, technological possibility, or emotional experience that first triggered the project?
All of the above, thank you!! My work in all its forms is all work in progress and everything I’ve ever created had been part of the process to the here and now, where I’m now experimenting with laser at an unprecedented level of power in the field of artistic expression, as far as I’m aware. It’s all an experiment, and Venice was an opportunity to carry it out. It was part one, part two we wil carry out in September and it will be informed by what we all just experienced. Expect to see a halo projected above the city. If it all works out.
Higher Power technically complex while remaining visually minimal. Could you describe how the work is physically constructed and what technologies were necessary to realize it?
I try to create a resonance or sense of harmony in all my work and the aim is transcendence, to disconnect with the physical realm, the noise, and to be more heart conscious. To achieve that I think in terms of distillation and purification , creating something that vibrates and resonates with our field of consciousness, through our senses, usually with sound and light energy. Working with my brilliant engineers in Germany, they have modified an extremely high-power infra red invisible laser, to create visible light at 515nm. To direct it up into space, a simple clean vertical axis, a pure tone of energy at high power, leading our attention up into the heavens, just had to be done. I just channeled it as my artform. We oscillated the beam at the sacred healing frequency of 432hz to really drive it in to you, and to the realms above. The intention was made clear.
MAKE LIGHT NOT WAR
The phrase “Make Light Not War” gives Higher Power a distinctly political dimension. How do the themes of peace and conflict connect to the work itself and to the technologies behind its creation? Do you feel Higher Power resonates differently in the current global atmosphere than it might have several years ago?
I’m totally apolitical but in these unprecedented times we are on edge due to the geopolitics playing out in our face. For sure the work did resonate because its a super sensory light signal in darkening times. I’m all about the light and tuning into our inner light to create peace, the refuge within. The phrase actually came from the fact that as an industrial and weapon grade technology, the infrared beam was invisible, we modified it to give visible light, literally to make Light not war.
Your works often create rare moments of collective silence and slowness within urban environments. What do you think happens to people during these shared experiences of contemplation, and why does this kind of experience feel increasingly important today?
If my work is successful, then it offers refuge in an a world where we are increasingly bombarded with data and distracted from our true nature. We are a part of nature not apart from it, but technology can get in the way, taking us away from our nature, rather than going deep in to it and used for purposes of transcendence.
Stillness is portal to the Divine.
For more information, please follow @chrislevine.
