The controlled and poetic use of artificial light sources in photography can often be likened to “painting with light”; to a true master light becomes fluid to be mixed, textured, filtered, masked and applied in a kind of photographic expressionism. This approach reaches an exquisite zenith in the work of Warren and Nick, whose relentless experimentation consistently uncovers new and arrestingly beautiful ways for light to interact with (subject) matter.
Echoing the progressive history of 20th century painting towards abstraction, their work has broken free of matter altogether, making light itself the subject (as Pollock, did with paint), becoming a distillation of the pure essence of photography, or in their words, hypervisuality. Further still, projects such as Synaesthesia, which attempts to render scent visible, have left behind any vestiges of reality, and exist only as digital apparitions. This obsession with light, which they strive to release from its material constraints, and dark - the essential canvas for their medium, gives their work a visionary, hallucinatory quality, combining beauty, mystery and awe in equal measure.
Understandably secretive about their technical and creative processes, they describe themselves as alchemists. They studiously push the limits of lighting, electronics, set design, image capture, and digital imaging technology to the point of breaking, and beyond. Their studios, always shrouded in vital darkness, are mixture of laboratory and playroom, where they combine a scientific method with joyful and reckless exuberance; carefully preparing their ingredients, mixing together in prescribed quantities, lighting the fuse, then running for cover.
Out of this controlled chaos, the primeval struggle between darkness and light give rise to images of startling beauty, images that simply could not have existed before.
