As twilight steals over the Calchaquí Valley in the Andean foothills, a dozen pilgrims gather in a curious, open-roofed chamber. They situate themselves on benches along the room’s perimeter, some reclining on the cool stone, and turn their gaze to the heavens, waiting for the show to begin.
Over the next 40 minutes, the chamber walls emanate a kaleidoscope of colors, subtly tinting the expanse overhead with the pastels of mountaintop alpenglow. As daylight turns to dusk, the sky moves through shades of muted orange, cornflower blue, pale rose, and deep navy, ending with a disorientingly inky, bottomless black. Any sense of the time passing ceases, transformed into an endless now.
As the atmosphere changes, a church-like hush descends on the room. Lying on one’s back to take in the expanse above, one has the sensation of standing on the sky, with the earth somehow above one’s head. There is an unmoored (but not unpleasant) feeling of the horizon disappearing, like skiing through a whiteout. And if it happens to be an inclement day, the metronomic drip-drop of rainfall provides a hypnotic underscore to this strange, meditative interlude.
This is Unseen Blue, the immersive experience that concludes a visit to the James Turrell Museum, set — quite improbably — on the grounds of the Colomé wine estate in northwestern Argentina. At upwards of 10,000 feet above sea level, the vineyards here are among the highest on earth, and Colomé’s Malbecs and Torrontes are deservedly renowned. But it’s the one-of-a-kind Turrell collection, which the artist himself helped install here in the mid 2000s, that inspires travelers to make the long journey to this remote corner of Salta province.
The experience is less “visiting a museum” and more “exploring a carnival funhouse on peyote.” Making your way through a series of color-themed “lightspaces” (the artist’s term), you begin to question your eyes, your very mind itself, as Turrell’s ingenious installations blur the lines between near and far, substance and space, reality and perception.
After the visual fusillade of the lightspaces, Unseen Blue feels like sweet relief and resolution: a zen garden adrift somewhere in the cosmos. It’s the largest of 86 “skyspaces” that Turrell has created since 1974. (An even larger one opens later this year at Denmark’s Aarhus Museum.) Inspired in part by the oculus of Rome’s Pantheon, Turrell’s open-air skyspaces are designed to play up — and play with — the intermingling of natural and artificial light. Unseen Blue upends our perception of both, challenging us to see where one ends and the other begins, and prompting us to wonder if the real thing is, in fact, just a trick of the eye.
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