Yann Kersalé, born in 1955, graduated from the Quimper School of Fine Arts in 1978 by achieving the Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique. Using light, as others may use clay or paint, he picks nighttime - most sensitive of all backgrounds -as his sphere of experimentation. With an extraordinary creative vitality, Kersalé has since produced hundreds of projects In Situ and Expéditions-Lumière amongst others, a luminous encephalogram of the ocean, the highjack of high technology objects, and intervened on art pieces or mythical architectural works. The most prestigious architects have appealed to him. Helmut Jahn commissioned the lighting of the Sony Centre in Berlin, the airports of Bangkok. For Jean Nouvel, he designed the red pulsations for the skylight of the Lyons Opera House, the lighting of the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, and of the Agbar Tower in Barcelona. Opposed to the brutal sodium illumination that disfigures monuments, he conceives luminous fictions, narrative works on the soul and history of towns such as Nantes and Rennes as well as the harbour of Saint Nazaire. Such work has required the invention of new lighting concepts: Objets-lumière such as luminous transplants, weightless objects that play on rhythmic components, on appearances, poetic projects with multiple references, in which Kersalé’s spirit of freedom and provocation are always perceptible. In 2008, the studio is currently creating a light architecture for Brussels’ Grand Place in the event of the European Cultural Season, a light itinerary in Angers, in Enghien-les-Bains, in Luxemburg and lighting the Docks de Paris with Jakob and Mc Farlane, or more the Philharmonie de Paris, the Copenhagen concert hall and the Louvre in Abu Dhabi with Jean Nouvel. And last but not least with Helmut Jahn, projects are carried out in Qatar, in Germany and in Washington. Recently, Yann Kersalé has intervened on the Gennevilliers Theater, in Bordeaux on the cours Victor Hugo, in Nice with the creation of light sculpture for the tramway, in Bonn for the Deutsche Post, in Seoul on the Peace Passerelle with Rudy Ricciotti, in Japan, Portugal, Greece…
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