Light Fantastic.(Leo Villareal)

Byline: LESLIE CAMHI editor: Valerie Steiker

Leo Villareal finds the perfect medium for transforming a landmark space.

Dominating Leo Villareal' s Chelsea studio is a fifteen-by-ten-foot panel of pulsating white lights whose constantly shifting arrangements suggest fast-breaking clouds or swarms of insects. "I was looking at a lot of videos dealing with fertility, generationthat moment of life when one thing meets another and something happens," the 42-year-old artist says of Diamond Sea, but he might well be talking about Multiverse, his monumental new installation of more than 40,000 LEDs (light-emitting diodes) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Multiverse' s finely tuned, computer-generated cosmologies unfold in a futuristic, I. M. Peidesigned passageway linking the architect's modern artfilled East Building with the more traditional West Building. Thousands of visitors pass there daily. "It's fascinating to watch people respond to it," says the museum's director, Earl A. "Rusty" Powell III. "One of the early architects who worked on the building with Pei came through and said, 'This has simply been waiting to happen.'"

Bridging worlds is one of Villareal's specialties. The bilingual son of a Mexican father and a Texan mother, he grew up between JuA rez and El Paso. "It was an amazing place to be a child," the artist recalls, "because you go across the Rio Grande, which is not so big, and everything is different. It's as if you've traveled 3,000 miles. It was very good preparation for navigating new things. So I was pretty undaunted when it came to jumping into technology."

There were frequent visits to Marfa, Texasan art-world outpost thanks to Donald Juddwhere his ...