Patrice Warrener

Patrice Warrener (1948 to 2026) was a French light artist who taught the world to see old stone in colour. He invented Chromolithe, a polychromatic illumination system that projects meticulously painted images of light back onto the very buildings they were drawn from, so that cathedrals, town halls, fountains and theatres appear to be freshly painted for a few nights. Over his career he lit up more than sixty buildings with Chromolithe in close to a dozen countries, and in a 2025 interview he put the total of projects of this kind at around a hundred, across France, Europe and further afield.

Warrener trained in the graphic arts at the École Estienne in Paris, the French school of printing and book arts, and he described himself as a printer by training. That background shaped everything that followed. Before computers, he was already thinking about colour separation, registration and plates, and Chromolithe would eventually turn those printing ideas into light.

His first life in light was on stage. He worked with the French co-operative Open Light and then joined the English musician and electronic music pioneer Tim Blake, the former Gong and Hawkwind keyboard player. Together, in the Crystal Machine shows of the mid and late 1970s, they brought laser lighting effects into live electronic music performances. Archive footage from Swiss television shows Warrener on tour with Blake in 1977 and 1978, and Blake continued to work with him on Chromolithe in later years.

Warrener developed Chromolithe at the end of the 1980s. The process began with a survey of the building and its materials and a precise photographic record taken with a specially built camera from the exact positions where the projectors would later stand. He then spent months at a computer outlining architectural details and choosing colours, printed the results onto 24 by 24 centimetre photographic plates and projected them back through powerful custom xenon projectors placed discreetly so that the source of the light seemed to vanish. Because many Gothic and sculpted facades were originally painted, his work was often read as a temporary restoration of lost colour.

Lyon became the city most closely tied to his name. He took part in a 1997 light event that foreshadowed the Fête des Lumières, and for the first official festival in December 1999 he coloured the facade of the Hôtel de Ville on the place des Terreaux. He returned many times, illuminating the place des Jacobins in 2000, the Bartholdi fountain in 2010, the Jacobins fountain again in 2016 with Fontaine d'étoiles, the Théâtre des Célestins in 2017 for Vingt années lumière, and the Jacobins fountain once more in 2024 for the festival's twenty fifth anniversary. The festival called him a true figure of the Fête des Lumières, with around a dozen works there since 1997.

His work travelled widely. In December 1999 he dressed the facade of the Deauville casino for the millennium. In January 2016 his piece The Light of the Spirit projected colour onto the statues of the west front of Westminster Abbey for Lumiere London, a work that returned to the abbey in 2018. Chromolithe also appeared at GLOW Eindhoven, at the Römerberg in Frankfurt in October 2017, at Lausanne Cathedral, on the Church of San Jerónimo el Real in Madrid at Christmas 2023, at the Teatro Arriaga during Bilbao's White Night, on the Church of the Pilgrim Virgin in Pontevedra to open the 32nd Pontevedra Art Biennial in June 2025, and on Puebla Cathedral for GLOW México in April 2026, the festival's first edition in Latin America.

Warrener liked to compare his craft to music. "I play with light as with music, with the most beautiful notes possible," he told the Fête des Lumières. He said he did not want to impose a message on audiences, only to help people rediscover architecture differently through colour and contemplation.

Patrice Warrener died on 9 October 2026, at the age of 78. The cause of death has not been made public. His influence can be seen in the many light festivals that now animate heritage cities around the world.