Sony Center, Berlin, atrium during sunset sequence; lighting design by Yann Kersalé
Yann Kersalé (born 17 February 1955) is a French conceptual artist who works with light. His studio is in
Vincennes.
Life and career
Kersalé was born in
Boulogne-Billancourt,[n 1] a suburb of Paris, and spent part of his childhood in the
Breton port town of
Douarnenez.[1] He graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in
Quimper in 1978.[1][2] Beginning in 1984 at the Société métallurgique in
Caen,[1] he has produced architectural illuminations of both natural environments and buildings that have given rise to a school of modern French light art.[3] He has worked with
Helmut Jahn on the
Sony Center in Berlin and the
Bangkok and
Chicago O'Hare airports and with
Jean Nouvel on the
Lyon Opera House, the
Torre Agbar in Barcelona, the
Musée du quai Branly and the Philharmonie concert hall in Paris, and the
Abu Dhabi branch of the
Louvre Museum, and has also been commissioned to design projects for numerous cities, including Nantes, Rennes, Saint-Nazaire, Le Havre, Cherbourg, Bordeaux, and Montpellier in France and Bangkok, Quebec City, Frankfurt, Berlin, Las Vegas, Washington, DC, Lisbon, Brussels, and St Petersburg in other countries.[4][5] In 2007 alone, he worked in Luxembourg, Paris, and Korea.[4]
He has also produced an interior lighting scheme for the
Francilien commuter trains,[6][7] and in 2010 the Jallum lighting units for
Baccarat, rechargeable and dimmable LED lights in cut crystal cylinders on anodised aluminium bases for indoor or outdoor use.[8][9][10]
Artistic philosophy
Kersalé rejects the label of either architect or
light artist, preferring that of "project artist".[11] He has chosen the night, "the locus of choice of what is perceived", to create "luminous fictions, a narrative work on the spirit and memory of cities." However, he "fights ceaselessly against artificial lighting that kills authentic nocturnality and masks the sky", which has led him to create innovative new forms of illumination.[12] In 2011, a reviewer in Le Figaro called him "a passionate fan of chiaroscuro" who loves to plunge viewers into an "abyss" of total darkness to maximise their perception of the surprising narrative fantasies he constructs with light.[13]
He regards his work for cities as a form of urban renewal, reclaiming areas where people can stroll safely at night, and saving industrial artifacts that might otherwise be destroyed.[5] For example, his lighting of the boat lifts at
Thieu, Belgium, led to their preservation and the creation of a tourist promenade,[14] and his project at the submarine base in
Saint-Nazaire transformed a liability that was to have been demolished into a civic asset.[15] The base is now a cultural centre with shops and a museum, and Barcelona architect
Manuel de Solà-Morales redesigned the surrounding area.[16]
Le songe est de rigueur,
Pointe de la Torche, Finistère, 1986. Computerised projection of light patterns on the ocean in response to "the movements of the tides, the currents, the wind and so forth" against "a set of stranded, wide-eyed, steel megaliths".[17][18] Kersalé describes it in an interview as intended as "a kind of encephalogram of the sea".[6] It was filmed by
Henri Alekan under the subtitle Structures de lumière.[19]
Irréversibles lumières,
Grand Palais, Paris, 1987. Blue fluorescent lighting inside the glass dome waxing and waning forty times a minute to produce the effect of a beating heart or a respiring lung,[20][21] while the metal framing the glass was picked out in white.
Convergence,
Grand Place, Brussels, 2008. Illumination as part of the
European Cultural Season, organised by invitation by the French government, using 2,209 LED modules (106,032 LEDs) to produce an inverted dome of lights over the square, to transform it into "an immense open-roofed ballroom".[22][23][24]
Permanent installations
Nuit des docks,
Saint-Nazaire, 1991. Night-time illumination of the docks, including a submarine base, in bright colours determined by analysis of the activity during the day.[1] The project, commissioned by the mayor, transformed the ugly military installation and site of unpleasant memories, which had been slated for demolition, into a civic asset. Kersalé cited a grandmother saying, "I would never have been able to imagine such a beautiful thing from such a horror."[25]
In Out,
Sony Center, Berlin, 2000. Illumination of the atrium roof in a series of simulated sunsets approximately 21 seconds in duration from sunset to midnight; during the rest of the night the lighting is dark blue, except for bright white light preceding sunrise and also preceding sunset.[26][27][28]
Diffraction,
Torre Agbar, Barcelona, 2005. Exterior illumination of the office tower causes it to "glow at night as a colorful monolith".[29] Lighting patterns are created by 4,500 panels each containing 18 LEDs, which can create 255 degrees of intensity and over 16 million hues, each panel independently controlled by a computer responding to 20,000 inputs including weather conditions and building systems.[30] The tower "vibrates in a play of primary and complementary colours."[31] Kersalé has described the lighting as "a vaporous cloud of colour that seeks moiré".[32] The lighting is installed between the building's façade and its glass skin; the lighted windows of people still at work contribute to the effect.[5]
L'Ô,
Musée du quai Branly, Paris, 2006: with Jean Nouvel and landscape architect
Gilles Clément. A 'lake' of 1,600 translucent rods that change colour between white and deep turquoise in response to the temperature recorded at a weather station are planted among the grasses and reeds in the museum gardens. The project title is a pun on l'eau, water, in reference to the primordial currents that lie beneath all human cultures; the museum houses indigenous art from all over the world.[5]
L'amorse du bleu,
Avenue Jean Médecin, Nice, 2008. Blue diodes in the form of
Morse code strung over the avenue; one of the 15 public art commissions, L'Art dans la ville, awarded by competition in 2004 in association with the construction of the
Nice tramway.[33] Kersalé's intent was "to create a vault of calm blue suspended in the air, in opposition to the density of the activity on the ground".[34][35]
Notes
^Some sources, for example the biography in L'Art dans la ville: avec le tramway Nice – Côte d'Azur, Communauté Nice-Côte d'Azur,
cached 27 April 2008 (pdf) (in French) p. 24, state his birthplace as Paris.
References
^
abcd"Yann Kersalé, un sculpteur de lumière", Nuits des docks, Services aux habitants, Saint-Nazaire-sur-Mer,
cached 27 April 2008(in French)
^Julia Schulz-Dornburg, Arte y Arquitectura: Nuevas Afinidades / Art and Architecture: New Affinities, Barcelona: GG, 2000,
ISBN978-84-252-1778-4,
p. 143.
^"The French light touch", designer profile, mondiale.co.uk, review of Vincent Laganier, Lumières architecturales en France, Paris: AS, 2004,
cached 27 April 2008(in French)
^
abL'Art dans la ville: avec le tramway Nice – Côte d'Azur, Communauté Nice-Côte d'Azur,
cached 27 April 2008 (pdf) p. 24 (in French)
^Christian Werner Thomsen, tr. John William Gabriel, Visionary Architecture: From Babylon to Virtual Reality, Munich/New York: Prestel, 1994,
ISBN978-3-7913-1425-9,
p. 185.
^L'Art dans la ville, p. 24: "Yann Kersalé choisit la nuit, lieu d'élection du sensible . . . . [I]l crée des fictions lumineuses, travail narratif sur l'âme et la mémoire des villes. Il n'a de cesse de lutter contre les lumières artificielles qui tuent le nocturne authentique et masquent le ciel, inventant ainsi de nouveaux concepts d'eclairage."
^Sophie De Santis,
Yann Kersalé, sept fois plus à l'ouest,"Le Figaro, 7 November 2011: "Yann Kersalé, architecte de la lumière, aime ce genre de mise en abîme. Cette plongée dans le noir complet, pour mieux discerner les contours de ses fantasmagories éclairées, entraîne le visiteur dans une fiction pleine de rebondissements. . . . On est immergé dans l'univers à la fois minéral et numérique d'un passionné de clair-obscur."
^Ariella Masboungi, "Penser la ville par la lumière", Ministère de la Région Wallonne, Les Cahiers de l'urbanisme 59/60, June 2006, Lumière—Couleur, pp. 12–19,
pp. 16, 17(in French)
^Dietrich Neumann, "Architectural Illumination since World War II", in Architecture of the Night: The Illuminated Building, ed. Dietrich Neumann, Munich/New York: Prestel, 2002,
ISBN978-3-7913-2587-3, pp. 78–86, p. 82.
^Bernard Marrey, Le Grand Palais: sa construction, son histoire, Librairie de l'architecture et de la ville, Paris: Picard, 2006,
ISBN978-2-7084-0776-3,
p. 114(in French)
^Masboungi,
pp. 13, 18: "Jamais je n'aurais pu imaginer une aussi belle chose avec une horreur pareille."
^"Selected Projects," Architecture of the Night, pp. 226–27.
^Dietrich Neumann, "Leuchtende Bauten—Architekturen der Nacht" / "Luminous Buildings—Architectures of the Night," in Leuchtende Bauten: Architektur der Nacht / Luminous Buildings: Architecture of the Night, eds. Marion Ackermann and Dietrich Neumann, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz / Maidstone: Amalgamated Book Services, 2006,
ISBN978-3-7757-1757-1, pp. 16–21, 24–29, pp. 18–19, 26.
^Jürgen Knirsch, Stadtplätze: Architektur und Freiraumplanung, Leinfelden-Echterdingen: Koch, 2004,
ISBN978-3-87422-656-1,
p. 101(in German)
^Neumann, "Leuchtende Bauten—Architekturen der Nacht" / "Luminous Buildings—Architectures of the Night," pp. 19, 26.
^Torre Agbar, Edificios, Factoría Urbana (in Spanish)
^"La volonté de Yann Kersalé est de créer une voûte de calme bleu suspendue dans les airs, en opposition à la densité des trafics au sol": "L'amorse du bleu", L'art dans la ville—Les œuvres de la nuit, Communauté d'Agglomération Nice Côte d'Azur,
archived 2 May 2008(in French)
Philippe Curval. Yann Kersalé. In association with the exhibit "Expédition Lumière", 27 April – 10 July 1994 at Espace Electra. Monotypes. [Paris]: Hazan, 1994.
ISBN978-2-85025-382-9
Philippe Curval with Yann Kersalé. Yann Kersalé: Expéditions lumière / Light Expeditions. Catalogue. Paris: Enrico Navarra Gallery, 1995.
OCLC52349752
Jean-Paul Curnier, Henri-Pierre Jeudy, Monique Sicard and Eric Germain, with translations by Jean-Hugues de Vandière. Yann Kersalé: Light for Landmarks / Structures lumière. Paris: Norma, 2003.
ISBN978-2-909283-82-1
Vincent Laganier. Lumières architecturales en France. Scéno +. Paris: AS, 2004.
ISBN978-2-912017-25-3(in French)
Sony Center, Berlin, atrium during sunset sequence; lighting design by Yann Kersalé
Yann Kersalé (born 17 February 1955) is a French conceptual artist who works with light. His studio is in
Vincennes.
Life and career
Kersalé was born in
Boulogne-Billancourt,[n 1] a suburb of Paris, and spent part of his childhood in the
Breton port town of
Douarnenez.[1] He graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in
Quimper in 1978.[1][2] Beginning in 1984 at the Société métallurgique in
Caen,[1] he has produced architectural illuminations of both natural environments and buildings that have given rise to a school of modern French light art.[3] He has worked with
Helmut Jahn on the
Sony Center in Berlin and the
Bangkok and
Chicago O'Hare airports and with
Jean Nouvel on the
Lyon Opera House, the
Torre Agbar in Barcelona, the
Musée du quai Branly and the Philharmonie concert hall in Paris, and the
Abu Dhabi branch of the
Louvre Museum, and has also been commissioned to design projects for numerous cities, including Nantes, Rennes, Saint-Nazaire, Le Havre, Cherbourg, Bordeaux, and Montpellier in France and Bangkok, Quebec City, Frankfurt, Berlin, Las Vegas, Washington, DC, Lisbon, Brussels, and St Petersburg in other countries.[4][5] In 2007 alone, he worked in Luxembourg, Paris, and Korea.[4]
He has also produced an interior lighting scheme for the
Francilien commuter trains,[6][7] and in 2010 the Jallum lighting units for
Baccarat, rechargeable and dimmable LED lights in cut crystal cylinders on anodised aluminium bases for indoor or outdoor use.[8][9][10]
Artistic philosophy
Kersalé rejects the label of either architect or
light artist, preferring that of "project artist".[11] He has chosen the night, "the locus of choice of what is perceived", to create "luminous fictions, a narrative work on the spirit and memory of cities." However, he "fights ceaselessly against artificial lighting that kills authentic nocturnality and masks the sky", which has led him to create innovative new forms of illumination.[12] In 2011, a reviewer in Le Figaro called him "a passionate fan of chiaroscuro" who loves to plunge viewers into an "abyss" of total darkness to maximise their perception of the surprising narrative fantasies he constructs with light.[13]
He regards his work for cities as a form of urban renewal, reclaiming areas where people can stroll safely at night, and saving industrial artifacts that might otherwise be destroyed.[5] For example, his lighting of the boat lifts at
Thieu, Belgium, led to their preservation and the creation of a tourist promenade,[14] and his project at the submarine base in
Saint-Nazaire transformed a liability that was to have been demolished into a civic asset.[15] The base is now a cultural centre with shops and a museum, and Barcelona architect
Manuel de Solà-Morales redesigned the surrounding area.[16]
Le songe est de rigueur,
Pointe de la Torche, Finistère, 1986. Computerised projection of light patterns on the ocean in response to "the movements of the tides, the currents, the wind and so forth" against "a set of stranded, wide-eyed, steel megaliths".[17][18] Kersalé describes it in an interview as intended as "a kind of encephalogram of the sea".[6] It was filmed by
Henri Alekan under the subtitle Structures de lumière.[19]
Irréversibles lumières,
Grand Palais, Paris, 1987. Blue fluorescent lighting inside the glass dome waxing and waning forty times a minute to produce the effect of a beating heart or a respiring lung,[20][21] while the metal framing the glass was picked out in white.
Convergence,
Grand Place, Brussels, 2008. Illumination as part of the
European Cultural Season, organised by invitation by the French government, using 2,209 LED modules (106,032 LEDs) to produce an inverted dome of lights over the square, to transform it into "an immense open-roofed ballroom".[22][23][24]
Permanent installations
Nuit des docks,
Saint-Nazaire, 1991. Night-time illumination of the docks, including a submarine base, in bright colours determined by analysis of the activity during the day.[1] The project, commissioned by the mayor, transformed the ugly military installation and site of unpleasant memories, which had been slated for demolition, into a civic asset. Kersalé cited a grandmother saying, "I would never have been able to imagine such a beautiful thing from such a horror."[25]
In Out,
Sony Center, Berlin, 2000. Illumination of the atrium roof in a series of simulated sunsets approximately 21 seconds in duration from sunset to midnight; during the rest of the night the lighting is dark blue, except for bright white light preceding sunrise and also preceding sunset.[26][27][28]
Diffraction,
Torre Agbar, Barcelona, 2005. Exterior illumination of the office tower causes it to "glow at night as a colorful monolith".[29] Lighting patterns are created by 4,500 panels each containing 18 LEDs, which can create 255 degrees of intensity and over 16 million hues, each panel independently controlled by a computer responding to 20,000 inputs including weather conditions and building systems.[30] The tower "vibrates in a play of primary and complementary colours."[31] Kersalé has described the lighting as "a vaporous cloud of colour that seeks moiré".[32] The lighting is installed between the building's façade and its glass skin; the lighted windows of people still at work contribute to the effect.[5]
L'Ô,
Musée du quai Branly, Paris, 2006: with Jean Nouvel and landscape architect
Gilles Clément. A 'lake' of 1,600 translucent rods that change colour between white and deep turquoise in response to the temperature recorded at a weather station are planted among the grasses and reeds in the museum gardens. The project title is a pun on l'eau, water, in reference to the primordial currents that lie beneath all human cultures; the museum houses indigenous art from all over the world.[5]
L'amorse du bleu,
Avenue Jean Médecin, Nice, 2008. Blue diodes in the form of
Morse code strung over the avenue; one of the 15 public art commissions, L'Art dans la ville, awarded by competition in 2004 in association with the construction of the
Nice tramway.[33] Kersalé's intent was "to create a vault of calm blue suspended in the air, in opposition to the density of the activity on the ground".[34][35]
Notes
^Some sources, for example the biography in L'Art dans la ville: avec le tramway Nice – Côte d'Azur, Communauté Nice-Côte d'Azur,
cached 27 April 2008 (pdf) (in French) p. 24, state his birthplace as Paris.
References
^
abcd"Yann Kersalé, un sculpteur de lumière", Nuits des docks, Services aux habitants, Saint-Nazaire-sur-Mer,
cached 27 April 2008(in French)
^Julia Schulz-Dornburg, Arte y Arquitectura: Nuevas Afinidades / Art and Architecture: New Affinities, Barcelona: GG, 2000,
ISBN978-84-252-1778-4,
p. 143.
^"The French light touch", designer profile, mondiale.co.uk, review of Vincent Laganier, Lumières architecturales en France, Paris: AS, 2004,
cached 27 April 2008(in French)
^
abL'Art dans la ville: avec le tramway Nice – Côte d'Azur, Communauté Nice-Côte d'Azur,
cached 27 April 2008 (pdf) p. 24 (in French)
^Christian Werner Thomsen, tr. John William Gabriel, Visionary Architecture: From Babylon to Virtual Reality, Munich/New York: Prestel, 1994,
ISBN978-3-7913-1425-9,
p. 185.
^L'Art dans la ville, p. 24: "Yann Kersalé choisit la nuit, lieu d'élection du sensible . . . . [I]l crée des fictions lumineuses, travail narratif sur l'âme et la mémoire des villes. Il n'a de cesse de lutter contre les lumières artificielles qui tuent le nocturne authentique et masquent le ciel, inventant ainsi de nouveaux concepts d'eclairage."
^Sophie De Santis,
Yann Kersalé, sept fois plus à l'ouest,"Le Figaro, 7 November 2011: "Yann Kersalé, architecte de la lumière, aime ce genre de mise en abîme. Cette plongée dans le noir complet, pour mieux discerner les contours de ses fantasmagories éclairées, entraîne le visiteur dans une fiction pleine de rebondissements. . . . On est immergé dans l'univers à la fois minéral et numérique d'un passionné de clair-obscur."
^Ariella Masboungi, "Penser la ville par la lumière", Ministère de la Région Wallonne, Les Cahiers de l'urbanisme 59/60, June 2006, Lumière—Couleur, pp. 12–19,
pp. 16, 17(in French)
^Dietrich Neumann, "Architectural Illumination since World War II", in Architecture of the Night: The Illuminated Building, ed. Dietrich Neumann, Munich/New York: Prestel, 2002,
ISBN978-3-7913-2587-3, pp. 78–86, p. 82.
^Bernard Marrey, Le Grand Palais: sa construction, son histoire, Librairie de l'architecture et de la ville, Paris: Picard, 2006,
ISBN978-2-7084-0776-3,
p. 114(in French)
^Masboungi,
pp. 13, 18: "Jamais je n'aurais pu imaginer une aussi belle chose avec une horreur pareille."
^"Selected Projects," Architecture of the Night, pp. 226–27.
^Dietrich Neumann, "Leuchtende Bauten—Architekturen der Nacht" / "Luminous Buildings—Architectures of the Night," in Leuchtende Bauten: Architektur der Nacht / Luminous Buildings: Architecture of the Night, eds. Marion Ackermann and Dietrich Neumann, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz / Maidstone: Amalgamated Book Services, 2006,
ISBN978-3-7757-1757-1, pp. 16–21, 24–29, pp. 18–19, 26.
^Jürgen Knirsch, Stadtplätze: Architektur und Freiraumplanung, Leinfelden-Echterdingen: Koch, 2004,
ISBN978-3-87422-656-1,
p. 101(in German)
^Neumann, "Leuchtende Bauten—Architekturen der Nacht" / "Luminous Buildings—Architectures of the Night," pp. 19, 26.
^Torre Agbar, Edificios, Factoría Urbana (in Spanish)
^"La volonté de Yann Kersalé est de créer une voûte de calme bleu suspendue dans les airs, en opposition à la densité des trafics au sol": "L'amorse du bleu", L'art dans la ville—Les œuvres de la nuit, Communauté d'Agglomération Nice Côte d'Azur,
archived 2 May 2008(in French)
Philippe Curval. Yann Kersalé. In association with the exhibit "Expédition Lumière", 27 April – 10 July 1994 at Espace Electra. Monotypes. [Paris]: Hazan, 1994.
ISBN978-2-85025-382-9
Philippe Curval with Yann Kersalé. Yann Kersalé: Expéditions lumière / Light Expeditions. Catalogue. Paris: Enrico Navarra Gallery, 1995.
OCLC52349752
Jean-Paul Curnier, Henri-Pierre Jeudy, Monique Sicard and Eric Germain, with translations by Jean-Hugues de Vandière. Yann Kersalé: Light for Landmarks / Structures lumière. Paris: Norma, 2003.
ISBN978-2-909283-82-1
Vincent Laganier. Lumières architecturales en France. Scéno +. Paris: AS, 2004.
ISBN978-2-912017-25-3(in French)