A laser beam cuts the sky from the patio of Casa Soler i Palet. This spectacular exhibit by Jou Serra relates light, gender and body. Beyond the physical power of the piece, there’s also the research that went into it, a study that took Jou all the way back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to discover that light and gender are much more inter-related than we think.

Representation of the world is an invention. There’s no single way to see it or represent it, and the pictorial perspective that today seems the most natural way to understand space would have been totally incomprehensible to a medieval observer. In fact, the great invention of the Renaissance (or the biggest scam, depending on how you look at it) was the single point of view (forget “depending on how you look at it”, there’s only one right way to look). All the optical creations that arose out of the Renaissance (perspective, magnifying glasses and many more technologies) were not only based on a single point of view, but on a single eye, a single idea. Renaissance reality is cyclopean or cross-eyed.

But when light, apparently white, touches matter that divides it, all the frequencies that it contains appear visible to us through colour, like a rainbow. The phenomenon of diffraction helps us understand how, like light, gender is a naturalised invention, and that the reality of body and matter is much more than binary or monoscopic. Due to being under-represented, this whole intermediate space ends up being unimaginable. And so we have Range in Between, born out of the desire to represent what has often been thought (and said) could not exist.

Jou’s chosen medium is the concentrated light of a laser, a body of light that caresses a surface and dances upon it. Just as Nilo Gallego uses auditory physiology to understand sound, Jou explores the eye as a technology to expand the way we view things.