The ARTfx Observer | August 2026
Occasionally, a project lands in our laps that has us scratching our caps. Yale’s Wu Tsai Institute needed a 33 square foot wall fixture to backlight a large-scale painting on handmade Italian paper, and the artist was flying in from Rome to finish the work in our shop. Watch how Saliency, La Memoria Cangiante came to light.
An Unusual Request
Yale’s Wu Tsai Institute, the university’s home for neuroscience and cognitive psychology, recently contacted ARTfx with an unusual request… and not for special lab equipment. They needed a 33 square foot wall fixture to backlight the work of celebrity visiting artist-in-residence, Serena Scapagnini.
Why we say, “Yes,” to these requests and what travels through the brains of ARTfx management when acquiescing, could easily become the subject of another of Serena’s compositions. However, by not saying, “No,” we inherited the complex job of backlighting the work.
The Artist and the Work
From Rome, Italy, Serena, an accomplished painter, illustrator, and art historian, was busy completing her latest piece, Saliency, La Memoria Cangiante, a large-scale, mixed media painting on handmade, imported Italian Fabriano paper. The work, conceived in dialogue with members of the scientific community at the institute, delves into the world of memory retrieval. Its composition centers around a sweeping blue wave, the artist’s visual interpretation of emanations from a brain’s coronal section and hippocampal folds.
Serena worked inside the ARTfx shop to finish the piece, with our team alongside her. Drawings are hidden within the texture of the paper, meant to emerge and recede depending on how the light falls, so the paper and the fixture had to be developed together rather than one after the other.
The Complex Job of Backlighting
Handmade paper does not transmit light evenly, and Serena did not want it to. Some passages of the painting needed to glow. Others needed to sit back in shadow so the drawings buried in the texture could surface as your eye adjusted. That is a lighting problem before it is a fabrication problem.
ARTfx’ 40″ high x 9′-10″ long floating acrylic diffuser panel, packed with multiple intensities of LED modules, closely illuminates the flow of Serena’s masterpiece which now hangs prominently in the Wu Tsai Institute’s inner atrium. Multiple acrylic layers and diaphragms diffuse the light unevenly by design, so the fixture paints with light rather than simply lighting the piece from behind.
“To work with fabricators that understand art at this level allows the work to be completed by their view and suggestion, every single detail, starting from which kind of screw we want to hang on the wall. I work with incredible people that were understanding exactly what I want, what I need, and the language of the artwork itself. That was very much in good hands.”
Serena Scapagnini — Visiting Artist-in-Residence, Wu Tsai Institute, Yale University
See the Work
Project Credits
Client: Wu Tsai Institute, Yale University, New Haven, CT
Artist: Serena Scapagnini, visiting artist-in-residence
Artwork: Saliency, La Memoria Cangiante — mixed media on handmade Fabriano paper, Fabriano, Italy
Backlit Framework, Lighting & Installation: ARTfx
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