Gaspare Di Caro

An Italian-French artist, pioneer of a luminous art that reconciles technology with heritage.

THE ARTIST

Gaspare Di Caro is a Franco-Italian artist and luminographer whose work transforms light into a language and architecture into a medium.

His career began in cinema, where he notably worked alongside Ettore Scola, before moving through literature, theatre and the visual arts.
Along the way, he encountered major figures of literature and thought such as Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia and Eugène Ionesco, whose influence profoundly shaped his relationship with narrative, space and perception.

From these successive experiences—from cinema to literature, from theatre to luminography—emerged an artistic language in which the image is constructed within real space. He thus developed luminography, literally “writing with light”, at the crossroads of art, optics, architecture and memory.
Building on the Renaissance exploration of the camera obscura and perspective, he transposes these principles into contemporary architectural space.
Each work is born from a specific place and a carefully determined viewpoint, which he calls the Œil du Prince — the Prince’s Eye.

From this unique vantage point, drawing, light and architecture are recomposed, turning the monument itself into the medium of the artwork.
Technology, although essential, is ultimately intended to disappear: when the artwork appears, nothing should remain but the light.
This research has led him to create works on iconic architectural sites and monuments throughout Europe and Latin America.
From Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro to Oscar Niemeyer’s National Museum in Brasília, his works confront light with monumental scale.
In Cuba, his luminographies have transformed major buildings in Havana and Santiago de Cuba; in Ragusa Ibla, light brings the memory of the 1693 earthquake back to life.

Permanent, precise and highly energy-efficient, his luminography proposes a different approach to monumental lighting: to reveal rather than simply illuminate.
Gaspare Di Caro thus creates monumentality without mass, capable of transforming architecture without ever touching it.

From narrative to image, from image to space: architecture becomes the canvas, light becomes the writing, and the Prince’s Eye becomes the artwork.

THE TECHNIQUE

Luminography makes it possible to project images that are carefully calculated and drawn in perspective using the Camera Obscura, a tool used by the great masters of the Renaissance. Measurements of distance, perspective angles, vanishing lines, as well as axes and parallaxes, are inspired by the calculations of Filippo Brunelleschi.

It ensures highly precise projection, long-lasting installations, no light pollution, and low energy consumption relative to the illuminated surface. Although rooted in ancient principles, this technique is firmly oriented toward the future.