FALLING LIGHT/ 輝きの終焉

23.10.2025 

Light falls. Not with a sudden crash, but with the relentless silence of what is consumed. It falls like the sun bending toward the horizon, like a candle slowly extinguishing, like a word fading on the lips before dissolving. Every gleam already carries within it the destiny of its end. In fact, there is no brilliance that does not know its own fall, no glow that is not destined to transform into shadow. And yet, it is precisely in this falling that light reveals itself. It reveals itself when shadows begin to stretch, contours blur, and space changes its skin. The air becomes denser, time more fragile, everything seems to hold its breath, and the fall of light becomes a moment we cannot possess, but can only pass through, like a threshold that allows no return.

So too is our existence. We are not straight lines, but transitions. We are not fixed identities, but forms that constantly transform. Our faces change, our desires dissolve, our memories change color like autumn leaves. Every emotion, every bond, every certainty carries within it the trace of its own dissolution. Nietzsche imagined eternal recurrence as the ultimate challenge: to live every moment knowing it will repeat infinitely. Yet perhaps the deepest vertigo lies not in repetition, but in uniqueness. In knowing that nothing will ever return the same way, that what we love vanishes only once and, precisely for that reason, becomes irrepeatable. There is, in fact, no second chance for the light of that sunset, for the gaze of that moment, for the tremor of that embrace.

The falling light thus becomes a mirror of our own finitude. It reminds us that we are fragile beings, traversed by time, constantly transformed by what we lose. Every passing instant is at once loss and gift, absence and revelation. The fall of light is the way the universe whispers to us that nothing truly belongs to us—not even ourselves. We are processes, passages, dissolutions. And for this reason, intense. To fall does not mean to vanish. It means to change. Like light that, in extinguishing, becomes memory. Like stars that die only to be reborn as dust and generate new skies. In this way, falling light is not negation, but metamorphosis: it is energy released, brilliance recomposed elsewhere. Indeed, dawn could not exist without the surrender of sunset, and rebirth could not emerge without the sacrifice of night. In few and merciless words, life itself could not reveal itself without the experience of ending.

The beauty of falling light, then, lies in its inevitability. It is fragile, and therefore intense. It is transient, and therefore true. It is poignant, and therefore ours. We cannot hold it, but we can pass through it. We cannot stop it, but we can recognize it. And in that recognition, the space of awareness opens. Every dissolution becomes a threshold for a new beginning.

With FALLING LIGHT: 輝きの終焉, M.A.D.S. Art Gallery invites every artist to investigate the moment when light falls and transforms, to reflect on that delicate boundary between presence and absence, between visible and invisible, between memory and oblivion. Not to celebrate permanence, but to honor the courage of transition. To create works that contain the tremor of what vanishes and, at the same time, the secret strength of what is born from its fading. To translate into images, sounds, and matter the fragile instant when brightness extinguishes and becomes shadow, yet in that shadow prepares the return of light. For while every brilliance is destined to end, it is precisely in its fall that the brightest truth emerges: nothing remains the same, yet everything continues to shine as it changes. Light does not die: it slips, transforms, and is reborn. And in its falling, it leaves us a gift—the certainty that the end is not silence, but the beginning of another form of splendor. A fragile and infinite glow, reminding us that to live is to accept change. And that, in the very act of fading, life, like light, continues to blossom, revealing that what falls does not disappear, but reinvents itself in new forms of existence.

Concept by Lisa Galletti Senior Art Curator