Artiste-professeur invité

2008 - 2009

Yann Kersalé

Born in 1955 in Paris (France)

Using light like others use earth or paint, Yann Kersalé chose the night, chosen site of the sensitive, as an experimental terrain. Since then, with an extraordinary creative vitality, Yann Kersalé has elaborated over a hundred in situ projects and Light-expeditions: light encephalograms of the ocean, appropriations of high technology objects, inventions from civil engineering or mythical architecture.

The greatest architects call on him. Helmut Jahn commissioned the lights for the Sony Center in Berlin, for the airport in Bangkok. For Jean Nouvel, he designed the red lights in the roof of the Lyon Opera, the lighting of the Quai Branly museum in Paris, of the Tour Agbar in Barcelona.

Rising up against the brutal sodium lighting which disfigures monuments, he created in Nantes, Rennes and in the port of Saint Nazaire, light fictions, a narrative work on the spirit and the memory of these cities This work necessitates the invention of new lighting concepts, light-objects like grafts of light, light objects, light objects which play on the rhythm, on the apparition, poetic projects with multiple references in which the spirit of freedom and provocation of Yann Kersalé is always perceptible.

In 2008, the studio will create a light architecture for the Grand Place in Brussels as part of the European cultural season, a light path in Angers, in Enghien les bains, in Luxembourg and will light up the Docks in Paris with Jakob and Mc Farlane, and again the Paris Philharmonic, Copenhagen Opera and the Abu Dhabi Louvre with Jean Nouvel. Finally with Helmut Jahn, projects are underway in the Qatar, in Germany, and Washington. Lastly, Yann Kersalé has worked on the Théâtre de Gennevilliers, in Bordeaux on the cours Victor Hugo, in Nice by creating a light sculpture for a tramway station, in Bonn for the Deutsche Post, in Seoul on the Passerelle de la Paix with Rudy Ricciotti, in Japon, in Portugal, in Greece...


WORKS PRODUCED AT LE FRESNOY