MAGIC SQUARE OF THE SUN

‘One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.’
- Dan Flavin, The Strange Case of the Fluorescent tube, by Michael Gibson, Art International 1 (Autumn 1987).

‘Only for you, children of doctrine & learning, have we written this work. Examine this book, ponder the meaning we have dispersed in various places & gathered again; what we have concealed in one place we have disclosed in another, that it may be understood by your wisdom.’
- Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia, 1531.

Magic Square of the Sun is a key work of Children of the Light, bringing, as it does the duo’s origins in club culture together with their deep engagement with conceptual art and white magic.

The original work was a site-specific 4m x 4m wall-based piece commissioned for the entrance of De School, the now defunct, legendary, Amsterdam night club. It comprised 84 neon light tubes arranged in a configuration of squares, 6 long and 6 deep.

Visitors to De School remember the light from the work spilling out into the street, projecting the atmosphere of the club beyond its physical boundaries and sparking their anticipation of the night to come.

The work cycles through a sequence of geometric patterns. In its aesthetic, meet the retro elements of clubbing’s visual culture, that harks back to early arcade games like Pac Man, and the work of light-based minimalist artists such as Dan Flavin and Anthony McCall.

In conceptual art there is a correspondence between the immateriality of light and thought, and in a club, between the immateriality of light and emotion.

It is in their extrapolations from this last point, in The Children of the Light’s enquiry into the healing properties of light, that their work intersects with esoteric wisdom.

In ancient occult tradition each planet has traditionally been associated with a series of numbers and particular organizations of those numbers, especially magic squares, which comprise square arrays of numbers in which the sums of the numbers in each row, column and main diagonals are the same. The numbers associated with the Sun are 6, 36, 111, and 666, the sum of all the numbers in the magic square of the sun.

In occult culture, as exemplified in the work of medieval occultist Cornelius Aggripa, magic squares accessed the underlying numerological structure of the plane of material existence. In its 6 x 6 grid formation the Magic Square of the Sun symbolically recalls this tradition of hidden wisdom and its promise of connection with the healing energies in the universe.