Light painting is truly more than just creating random shapes in various spaces. Artists Yann Chatelin and Alexandre Dupeyron give us a greater insight to light painting, shed light on the beauty of calligraphy and share their crazy experiences as artists.  Whatever it is, we know that this witty pair will never stop making art, because they love it too much. Visible Ephemeral, Invisible Eternal runs till 9 January 2011 and is surely an exhibition that will not disappoint.

Briefly introduce yourselves and let us know what is it that the two of you do.

YC: At the moment, I’m living in Morocco, Casablanca to be specific. I’m a painter most of time, and I also work as sailing coach. I spend a lot of my time working on Arabic letters, creating acrylic portraits using knives on very large canvases. I met Alex at my first exhibition in Morocco and there and then we just decided to combine both our professions together to mix painting and photography.

AD: I had been looking for someone to light paint with for a long time because alone there’s too much equipment for one to carry, coupled with the fact that it’s always done at night. So it’s always good to be in a team. When I was in Morocco as a photojournalist, I went to cover Yann’s exhibition and I really liked his style painting so I talked to him a little more about my approach in photography. I was already doing something that we call filling, which using light or torches to bring out certain elements in photographs, so at that time I was actually already familiar with night photography, composing with light, but not yet writing. I was mostly behind my camera composing my landscape. But Yann and I pushed the idea and started painting in front of the camera. And yes, that’s how we started. Now that I’m living in Singapore, I’ve been traveling around because I am still working with two photo agencies, one in New York and one in Hamburg. But since I’ve moved to here, I’ve had more time to focus on my fine art photography because hen I was based in Morocco and Africa, I had too many assignments and too little time for anything else. There is a huge interest for Southeast Asia in the photojournalism world but the only way to talk about the region is when there is a conflict like in Bangkok or when there are natural disasters. Many European and US readers don’t know a lot about this region, so it’s good that I’m in here where photojournalism is still on the low. I mean for me it’s always fun. I’ve been interested in photography since I was thirteen and I have been going from photojournalism to commercial photography to fine art photography to corporate photography. As long as it’s photography, I enjoy it.

So let’s talk about Visible Ephemeral, Invisible Eternal. What was the basis of the exhibition and what kind of responses were you seeking from your viewers?

YC: We were trying to create metaphors of knowledge by using Arabic letters and Chinese sinographs that we consider to be international. Nothing is written on our photographs; the shapes that you see are purely inspired by Arabic and Chinese calligraphy which are two of the oldest forms of writing in the world. So to us, putting these two writings together is our way of presenting knowledge and something that is international.

AD: This is our own language that we created based on Arabic and Chinese letters and we really don’t want to literally say something and close the doors. We want to bring out the spirit and the knowledge behind the language, all of which is invisible.

Is that why the title of every painting is the exposure time?

AD: Yes, exactly. All the work that we have created is question about time. So we looked for backgrounds where you could really see the time imprints or where you can feel the spirituality of the location.

YC: Like on oil paintings and on rocks.

AD: Also on old trees; something that just looks fragile, that is going to disappear. But the light that we are using is invisible, and yet it is something that will never disappear. Light is here and in a way it refers to enlightenment. Is it the idea of bringing light to people and showing them that no matter what we are doing right now, it is here to stay.

Tell us more about the thought process behind your work. How do you decide on which colours to use for each character, and what backgrounds to choose?

YC: For the characters, it is mostly just a question of aesthetics based on the backgrounds that we use. It just has to have a contrast and to have good composition.

AD: We work a lot with natural light, the moon mainly. And we are really connected with the moon. Just two or three nights ago it was a full moon and it was the perfect timing for composing a light painting. We had the full moon that helped to bring out and brighten the landscape, the city lights which can be warm or cold. So we always choose our lights and decide on the extent of contrast depending on the temperate of the natural light we have.

Have you started light painting in Singapore yet?

YC: Yes, in fact for quite a few nights already.

AD: Yes, we are working on a series in Singapore.

Any idea when the Singapore series will be out?

AD: Good question. It depends on Vue Privée. I mean the art work will be finished soon; we’ve been working on it every night since the both of us were here. We’ve got few more nights to work on it. We’re also waiting for authorisation for a few spots that we plan to work at. You know it’s tricky to work in Singapore.

YC: We’ve been having a bit of difficulty.

A: We don’t usually get authorisation at all. We just go out in the night, and leave no traces behind. Except for the photography. So we don’t do anything wrong and we haven’t had any real problems so far. But there are always stories behind our pictures.

Speaking of which, what was the most memorable experience in creating your work together?

AD: We’ve got so many memorable ones. I think the one with the monks was the most memorable.

Y: Yes. It was in Phenom Phen this summer, and we spent all day in a temple chanting with the monks, which was really interesting. We asked them if we could try light painting in the temple at night, but they didn’t really understand.

AD: It was really difficult to explain to them what we wanted to because it’s abstract. If you talk to someone who has no idea about photography and try to explain long exposure to them, they wouldn’t know what you’re talking about.

YC: So we went back to the temple at night.

AD: Yes, we arrived quite late at night and the temple was really quiet and the two of us were carrying strange equipment with us like lights, batteries, tripods and everything.

YC: And they said to us that they would let us do one light painting session and they would see if we were allowed to do that in the temple. So we did one, and then suddenly there were ten monks looking into the camera and they were just so intrigued. They loved it, and so they just stayed with us all night long discussing about what we were doing and what they saw in the photography.

AD: That session was really amazing.

YC: And they gave us so much energy really.

AD: We ended up with the whole temple in front of us, so there were definitely more than ten.

YC: Between 15 to 20 monks.

AD: All of them were looking at us and even the oldest monks came to see us. And as you know monks are very spiritual, so the oldest monk started asking questions that really got us thinking and just helped us to put what we were doing for a very long time into words. You know the fact that we use light, and play with light is not even abstract. There is a lot of meaning behind what we’re diong and our idea of showing that the invisible is eternal is something that we feel is strongly related to Buddhism because they believe that your soul never dies. So in a way, there was a huge connection between us.

YC: And they were giving us so much energy.

AD: Yes. And because we had to keeping working and working and repeating everything.

YC: We were running everywhere with our lights.

AD: They were so encouraging, telling us keep on trying until we got what we wanted.

YC: Yes they told us to do the best we could and that temple was for us to work with. It was just perfect.

AD: There were a lot of monks cheering us on. It was great.

YC: Yes, really. I think it was a really important night for us. Most of the time, it’s just the two of us and there’s nobody else to feed energy off from.

AD: The other experiences that we had we more a bit scarier sometimes.

Any supernatural experiences since you’re always out at night?

YC: Not supernatural.

AD: But we had some scary ones because we would go into weird places late at night. The one that was the scariest was when we were in Burundi and it was just after the war between Hutu and Tutsi so there were a lot of rebels still running around in the forest. We were in the middle of the forest, which was quite far away from the closest village and we were light painting there.

YC: We were already painting for about one or two hours.

AD: And I didn’t hear it, but he heard this click click.

YC: There were guns being pointed at us.

AD: We had like six guys coming out from the jungle surrounding us and pointing their Kalashnikov guns at us.

YC: We were just two men at 2am in the morning painting in the forest.

AD: We were like, ‘Oh shit, we’re just painting.’

YC: But to explain to rebels that you were painting was quite hard. But luckily they were rebels.

AD: No they weren’t and they ended up staying and watching for us. So that was nice, we had militia with us.

YC: But at first it was horrible, really really scary.

AD: It was really funny. I mean now it is.

YC: But for a moment it was just terrible. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere.

AD: And we couldn’t speak the same language, we didn’t know the language. Right now, we are also slowly starting to work on film and this experience and also the one with monks are really good examples of how film or photography can help us to show people what we’re doing. So when we have guards or rangers stopping us, we have something to show them and then hopefully they understand why there are these crazy guys jumping around with their lights. You guys saw us, it’s like dancing.

You’ve been working together for almost 4 years now. How often do you manage to physically come together to collaborate?

YC: Actually, there never is time for that.

AD: Yes, it’s been a year since we stopped travelling together. But we did try to plan our trips together so that we can be with each other. I mean travelling together is a really important part of our work. Right now we have been working on Chinese sinographs because we’re in this region. We might go to India in the next trip and then try to meet up with people who have the knowledge of the writing in India and learn a little bit from them. Or Iran maybe. I just came back from Iran and it’s such an amazing place really. I would love to do this in Iran.   So I’m a freelancer, he’s a teacher but he hardly does anything. He works like three months in a year.

YC: So there’s a lot of time.

AD: So we always take some and give ourselves freedom to think and work on new ideas. We are still trying to push the idea of light painting forward like working on water reflections. There are so many that we have, we just need the time to do it.

YC: And a little bit of money too. We have to sell our photography to pay for our tickets around the world.

What is about calligraphy that the both of you are so inspired and intrigued by?

YC: I have been obsessed with letters since I was very young. I had been doing graffiti for a long time, for a good eight years. So the art of graffiti is already completely involves working with letters. And so I think it’s just the continuity of this obsession and trying new forms of letters.

AD: It’s a little different for me. I think it came from the fact that I was travelling a lot. Language is really something that is part of my job; I can’t imagine working without knowing just a few words of the language in country that I was in. I was always focussing on the letters, on the language of all the places that I travelled to. And I was really fascinated with the shape of the letters. Yes, it’s something that is really inspiring. And it’s a good base to work on. It’s better than going completely abstract. At the end of the day what we do can be considered abstract, but we have a base and this is something we keep in mind; it’s where we draw the line in our work. Because again, letters are a symbol of knowledge and we really believe that knowledge will never die. In our society today, people are saying that we’re all reading less than before and that we’re getting lazy. But the letters are still here the knowledge is still here and if you want to have an access to it, it’s there.

How would you determine what a good light painting is?

YC: Good question. I guess it’s like drawing, it’s like photography. It’s question of forms, of colours and of balance. And of composition. We also have to be able to achieve a certain synergy between the two of us. Once it’s a good fusion and we can feel the energy coming together at the same time, we know it. Just like it that. And it shows in the photography too. It can take from 20 minutes to one complete night just to finish one light painting. And for the past few nights, we’ve been spending almost full nights on each one.

AD: Another thing is that makes a good light painting is the based on the location. We really have to feel the spirit of the place, and also to be able to move in the space. You know instead of traditional painting which is two dimensional where you just sit in front of a frame and paint, we are working in a  three dimensional space.

YC: So we move around in the background, in the foreground and so forth.

AD: Yes, we can go closer to the camera and a bit further away too; to get different depths. This is something you have to work on, in order to be able to feel the space. You have to be able to visualise what you’re painting in such a space. It’s like a cone that is going from the corner up, to infinity. So we’re moving inside this volume and this is something that takes a really long time to understand. At the beginning, people stay a bit static, even us.

YC: Yes. The first year we were light painting as we would do it on paper, and then we realised that we could go forward and backward. It was a really important step in our light painting.

AD: Yes that made a huge change. And now, more and more, we’re really able to see what we’re drawing even if it’s invisible. We can judge. We can feel the space, we will know the kind of light strokes that will get if we stood in certain positions. Like it would be thinner here and denser there, so we can work on the density, transparency of our strokes.

YC: It’s less and less freestyle.

AD: Exactly. The transparency and density is very important. We can move our lights slowly to get denser and more powerful strokes or we can move very quickly so that the light strokes can somewhat be infused with the background. There are infinite possibilities.

YC: And everything that we use is custom made.

AD: We’re always looking for new sources of light. We can only use batteries so there are some limitations. But there are so many things to do. I mean we’ve got tubes, LED, torches.

YC: Optic fiber, lasers.

So is it always just the two of you?

AD: Yes. But I think we need an assistant with us because some of the places that we go to is just too dangerous to leave the camera alone and away from it. So it would be good if someone could help us with that. Yesterday, for example, it was raining and because the assistant that we had before was not available, we had to figure out how to keep the camera sheltered.

YC: We ended up taping an umbrella onto the camera.

AD: And it’s really tiring.

YC: We just want to focus on the painting.

Yann, you were a graffiti artist before, so working in the streets should be something that you’re comfortable with.

YC: Yes of course, completely. Light painting reminds me a lot of graffiti sessions; it’s perhaps the same feeling. But graffiti is completely illegal.

AD: There’s nothing illegal in what we are doing now.

YC: Except for the places that we go.

AD: Sometimes we break into places. For example, a few days ago we went to the old national stadium before it got completely destroyed and we were really lucky because the guard was sleeping. So, we did what we needed to do and we left the place.

YC: We didn’t do anything wrong, we’re sure about that.

AD: But you know how Singapore can be, for security reasons you can’t do anything. I mean we are agile and we know what we’re doing. We were just on the roof that was 15m high and we jumped here and there so that we could stand at the edge and light paint. We are climbers, explorers, everything at the same time!

YC: Jumpers.

AD: We are always looking for places that might not appeal to the naked eye and we try to bring out the beauty of such areas in our photographs.

YC: Just like the Ho Chi Minh one. It did look quite horrible.

AD: Yes, that’s the piece with the construction site as the background. With the blue shapes on it. It’s the vertical one.

So what’s a day in the life of Yann and Alex like?

AD: There’s no average really.

YC: It’s completely different everyday. Everyday is a surprise.

AD: When it comes to light painting we usually spend the day thinking about what to do for the night and if we are in a place that we are unfamiliar with, we will usually rent a motorbike and just go on a random recce. But it can get tricky because what we see in the day can be very different from what we see at night.

YC: Because at night there’s light pollution and it can look really different.

AD: But sometimes there’s a certain magic to it that can translate in light painting, and this is something that we try to look for in our recees too. It’s the same as with photography. I could be the best photography, but there are just a few that will follow you all your life, maybe just five or ten pictures. And all this happens in places and moments that you don’t control. It’s just something that comes and this is the same with light painting. I mean when we look at the exhibition, there are a few that stand out to us and it cannot be explained, while people could feel otherwise.

Is light painting a tiring process because it can only be done at night?

YC: Yes, completely. We’re just exhausted.

AD: First of all, it’s at night. So we have to switch to the night life. That’s why we weren’t free in the morning. We were working last night although it wasn’t too late. We finished at 3am. But the day before, we ended at 6 am, when the sun started to rise.

YC: This summer was quite hot.

AD: Because we’re been driving a lot, always on the road.

YC: From Singapore to Hanoi, staying out all night and having to rough it out.

AD: Yes, we had to be really sporty because we had to climb, we had to run.

YC: We had to jump.

AD: We have done it in caves too. You haven’t seen these ones, but we’ve done a series of caves in a mountain. It was one of the monks that told us about this secret cave. So we went at night, we had our headlamps and all the equipment.

YC: And we ran along the river.

AD: At first, it was so difficult to find the place, and once we reached, we just squeezed ourselves into the small hole.

YC: And we had our bags of clothes, our bags of lamps and so many other things. We were so bulky.

AD: All that, and not a plan, no GPS to guide us. So it was really tiring, but once you reach places like that, it’s always worth it.

YC: Completely, completely.

AD: And it was really funny because it was so dark and slippery. And we were moving in complete darkness from place to another. So we fell so many times, we had scratches. And we destroyed the remote control; it ended up in the water.

YC: And then we broke the light tubes because they kept hitting the rocks.

A: Yes, I don’t know how many lights we broke. It was so many. Every time we g out, we break end up breaking our lights.

Last question. If you could work with any artist in the world, dead or alive, who would it be and why?

AD: Good question. Dead or alive. It’s not really an artist but I would go with Lance Armstrong just because I’m so fascinated with the moonlight. That’s it.

YC: I think I would love to see my favourite painter light painting with me; to have a synergy with someone that I admire most. That would be Ian Francis. He’s from the US and he has some really crazy paintings.