The Brazilian artist’s photographs, you see, demand an exquisite balance of two types of light: natural light, and the light created by manmade firework displays. Fading twilight is the temporal sweet spot, and on Brazil’s Cerrado, the central plateau from where most of the images in this series hail, fading twilight lasts between 30 and 50 minutes.
Impermanent Sculptures is Schietti’s experimental exploration into how long-exposure photography and fireworks can collaborate (with a bit of digital post-production work from the artist himself) to illuminate the trees and bodies of water.
The result is a series of dramatic, theatrical, moody photographs in which trees seem to drip with streaming showers of vivid white light, and in which the light itself seems to bounce from leaf to leaf and branch to branch leaving a thin, bright trail in its wake, like the trail of a sparkler dragged playfully through the cold night air.
Schietti’s mesmerising work with water, meanwhile, recalls that of engineer Stephen Orlando, who captures the patterns of motion through long-exposure photography. Both artists turn water into playgrounds of light, dance floors upon which beams, rays and sparks pirouette.
To these men, the whole world is viewed as a canvas for their art.
