Ilan El is a Melbourne-based artist, designer, and founder of ILANEL Design Studio, internationally recognised for his immersive light-based installations and bespoke luminaires. Trained as an architect and holding a Master of Design from RMIT University, Ilan’s work explores the emotional and psychological impact of light, blending art, design, and technology. His practice harnesses the transformative power of illumination through interactive, poetic, and often automated elements to create contemplative, joyful experiences. Notable commissions include works for the Australian War Memorial, The Hour Glass, and the NGV Triennial, with standout pieces such as ORA, Rain Collection, and Temporal Grid exemplifying his visionary approach to contemporary lighting design.
El’s solo exhibition Now, You’ll See is both a statement and an invitation asking viewers to engage not only with their eyes, but with their full sensory awareness. It marks the culmination of a long-held vision: light as a medium not just for seeing, but for feeling.
At the heart of Now, You’ll See is the idea that coloured light is more than illumination, it is a transformative force. El’s works don’t aim to represent the world, but to create an environment that affects the viewer directly. They invite immersion, allowing light to alter one’s internal state. The viewer becomes part of the work, engaging with the shifting relationship between self, space, and perception.
The exhibition features a progression through signature pieces from the luminous elegance of ORA and its evolved version ORA 2.0, to the expansive and meditative HORIZONS series. These works don’t simply light up their surroundings, they activate them. Drawing inspiration from 19th-century American Luminism, with its serene skies and quiet reverence for the immaterial, El reimagines these ideals through digital means. His works are not static; they combine photography with animated colour, creating vibrant hybrid forms.
In the HORIZONS series, monochrome seascapes are overlaid with fields of coloured light, transforming still images into atmospheric, almost cinematic scenes. These are not real places, but spaces suspended between memory, imagination, and digital simulation. A triptych with a tranquil ocean glows with periwinkle and lavender light beneath a perfectly straight horizon, a vision that feels less like nature and more like a digital, sublime mirage.
This use of synthetic colour raises a key question: what happens to the idea of the sublime in the age of augmented reality? El doesn’t answer this directly, instead, his works offer the experience of that question. The familiar becomes strange, the tangible becomes ethereal. The light doesn’t simply illuminate, it shapes the subject anew.
The recurring horizon line acts as a conceptual anchor. It is at once a limit and a gateway, a place of pause and potential. Like the immersive environments of James Turrell or Olafur Eliasson, El’s works create spaces that ask us to slow down, notice, and feel.
In Now, You’ll See, light becomes a language. It speaks to the body, evokes memory, and gestures toward a digitally shaped future. In a world increasingly filtered through screens and simulations, El reminds us that wonder still lives in the act of perception. It’s not about what’s real, but what we allow ourselves to truly notice.
And so—now, you’ll see.
