FLASH ART VOLUMES 003: Opacity

Flash Art has a lot to say about form. So much so that our regular discourse on contemporary art has overflowed, expanded, and oozed to the towering heights and endless planes of architecture. Flash Art Volumes is the home for these discussions on urban-planning conundrums, building-material ethics, mysterious edifices that dot the world, and what built structures could mean for aesthetics at large.

For its third edition, Flash Art Volumes 003 “Opacity,” to be released on the occasion of Milan Design Week 2026, the subject at hand is transparency and the necessity, or superfluity, of this quality. The issue’s covers feature Roni Horn, shot by Jeff Henrikson in the artist’s New York studio; Rose Wylie, photographed by Zora Sicher, following her show at the Royal Academy, London; and a photo essay by Jack Bool accompanied by guest editor Luis Ortega Govela’s essay “Fuck Transparency.” 

Inside, Wolfgang Tillmans pontificates on glass, transparency, and media transmission through his words and photography. Writer Sarah Johanna Theurer discusses the work of Sung Tieu in the lead-up to her work in the German Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Patrick McGraw of Heavy Traffic and Liam Denhamer of Juvenilia create a speculative work where fiction meets abandoned structure. Images by Maxfield Hegedus and words by Gracie Hadland sing an elegy for the recently closed French eatery Taix, an icon of Sunset Boulevard. 

“This issue moves beyond a conventional focus on art, architecture, and design,” says Alessio Avventuroso, Creative Director of Flash Art. “It approaches these disciplines as porous fields, entangled with broader cultural and perceptual frameworks.”

This current edition was shaped by guest editor Luis Ortega Govela, the Los Angeles–based Mexican architect and founder of Office LOG, a research-based design studio that works across disciplines. On the concept behind this special architecture issue, Ortega states, “We are living in an era of excessive visibility. Glass skins, curtain-wall systems, infinite screens — an architectural theology of transparency that promises openness while enforcing scrutiny. The tectonics of transparent surfaces have always been a moral technology. Every material carries its own ideology; glass, in its apparent innocence, has been the medium through which modernity perfected exposure. Everything must be visible, verifiable, legible. Transparency masquerades as honesty, democracy, openness — yet it functions as extraction. To be transparent today is to be made available for mining, sorted into data, folded into policing mechanisms.”

Many of the stories start in Los Angeles. Ana Howe Bukowski, with photography by Alejandro Rico-Gomez, looks at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center and unpacks the changing meaning of the institution in the face of America’s increased immigration enforcement. Then, the stories spread across the globe, continually interrogating the meaning of opaque forms. Paul Ruppert’s story looks to the dense, near-windowless architecture of the AT&T Long Lines Building in New York and demystifies its Cold War origins. Gaku Inoue writes on the prevalence of parking towers that have sprung up across Japan. Anne Holtrop, in conversation with Jack Self, discusses the cast glass of the Misk Art Institute in Riyadh and the political moment in a region where Holtrop has located his practice for more than a decade. The thread that unites these different stories is ultimately a meditation on what it means to want “everything transparent, everything accountable, everything exposed.”

“The issue proposes a counter-project: an architecture of opacity,” concludes Ortega. “The essays, images, and conversations are instruments toward rebuilding thickness, toward shadow, for an architecture that holds back. In darkness, the interior regains its depth; the self regains its right to desaturation and complexity.”