Space, sound and light: Leo Villareal works with pixels and binary code to create complex, rhythmic compositions

It all started at Burning Man.

Leo Villareal was tired of trying to find his campsite in the Nevada black night desert, so he fashioned a torch using 16 strobe lights.

He realized he had created a sculpture.

Today, the Albuquerque-born Villareal is an internationally-renowned artist who works with pixels and binary code to create complex, rhythmic compositions in light.

His latest piece “Astral Array” sprawls across the ceiling of the breezeway at the New Mexico Museum of Art Vladem Contemporary in Santa Fe, with 2,597, one-inch lights spanning 35 by 38 feet.

It pulsates, spirals and streams in a sparkling orchestra of the cosmos.

“Obviously, the work is about time,” Villareal said in a telephone interview from New York. “It’s moving constantly and changing. It’s abstract patterns, almost like visual music.”

The artist grew up first in Juárez, Mexico, then in El Paso, the son of a successful businessman who collected art.

“I think I was always really creative and curious,” he said. “I was basically tearing things apart. I somehow thought I could install a telephone in my parents’ bedroom in Ruidoso. Every time they used the phone, the alarm would ring.”

He didn’t realize he wanted to become an artist until he went to Yale University, where a sculpture class encouraged him to create using space, sound and light.

Space, sound and light: Leo Villareal works with pixels and binary code to create complex, rhythmic compositions

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“I thought it would be interesting to add computation,” he said. “I realized I could take people on these journeys using light.”

A stint working for Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen at his research lab taught him programming, editing and virtual reality.

“It kind of crystallized when I made that light sculpture,” Villareal said. “It went from one thing to the next; sometimes strobe lights, then LEDs, creating red, green and blue to make millions of colors.”

He installed work onto his first building at PS1 in Queens, part of the Museum of Modern Art, by applying 640 LED lights onto the scaffolding.

“I go really deep into technology,” he said.

Since then, he has added his light sculptures to bridges in San Francisco and London, to the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, and to galleries and museums in Switzerland; Palm Beach, Florida; Palo Alto, California; Hong Kong; Washington, D.C.; and in Madrid, among others.

He is interested in lowest common denominators, such as pixels or the zeros and ones in binary code. Starting at the beginning, using the simplest forms, Villareal begins to build within a framework. The resulting forms move, change, interact and ultimately grow into complex organisms that are inspired by the British mathematician John Conway’s work with cellular automata and the Game of Life.

New Mexico Museum of Art Executive Director Mark White said Villareal’s installation fit with Vladem’s building design.

“We wanted a special installation there,” he said. “Leo being an Albuquerque native and having an international reputation, it made a lot of sense.

“We knew what his LED installations looked like at the National Gallery and various places across the United States.”

Central to Villareal’s work is the element of chance.

“We as humans are inspired by information, and we’re attracted to light,” he said. “You have both in my work. It’s taking people on a journey, I describe my pieces often as visual campfires.”

Fresh from working in Tokyo as well as Santa Fe, Villareal next travels to Brown University for an October opening.