Ray of light

W2-based artists Rob and Nicky Carter's distinctive photographic work features in all the capital's most fashionable collections. Pendle Harte visits their studio

What do you get when you cross a painter with a photographer? That’s the question asked by Rob and Nicky Carter’s work. When they got married they began to fuse their crafts, Nicky’s fine art and Rob’s photography, and now the couple is well-established on the art scene with a decade of work and exhibitions behind them. Their colourful light paintings and sculptures have been commissioned by corporate as well as private clients and their immediately recognisable work hangs in lots of London’s most fashionable homes.
But what is it? The bulk of Rob and Nicky’s work is what they call “painting with light”, made by shining lights of different colours at photographic paper for varying lengths of time. “This creates the purest colours and each piece is unrepeatable,” says Nick. They’re not photographs, there’s no lens and no film involved, and as abstracts, they’re not photograms either. “Basically we started with photography and removed the subject, leaving us with abstracts of light, which we call lumingrams,” explains Rob. Other work is sculpture, made in neon and sharing the focus on pure, bright colour.
I visit them at home near Lancaster Gate, very close to Hyde Park, where one of their most recent projects is currently showcased: a fundraising deckchair design for the Royal Parks that features a butterfly photogram. We bomb down the Westway to their studio in Acton, where they moved all their work once their children were old enough to destroy things . The studio houses the country’s last remaining Cibachrome machine, a big and precious piece
of machinery that has been displaced in the world of regular photography by the invasion of digital. It processes photographic paper by fixing and washing, rolling it out as a finished piece, producing colours that will never fade, far superior, says Rob, to the digital scan, whose colours are far from permanent.
A series of recent works was made by swinging a pendulum of changing-colour light very slowly over a large piece of photographic paper for long periods of time. The resulting graphic swirl, when hung in a dark room with coloured lights shining at it, creates a vivid illusion of movement, as seen at recent shows at the Museum of Neon Art in Los Angeles and  at the new Kinetica museum in Spitalfields. Another recent project focuses on oil paintings, with vast blown-up details of tiny corners of oil that show in terrifying detail the intricate movement and texture of the paint. “They’re very visceral and in your face, showing even more detail than in the original painting,” says Nicky. “We wanted to use traditional oil because it’s dying out, as a nod to our fine art roots. When we  started, photography wasn’t accepted as an art form in the way that it is now and we’re interested in the relationship between fine art and photography.”
Last month the pair exhibited a series of Twelve Luminograms at the Fine Art Society and a recent commission for Land Securities saw them create a movement-sensitive neon sculpture for an office building in Victoria Street. And what next? This afternoon they’re visiting a house in the Boltons to discuss a site-specific commission. Nicky is curator of the Groucho Club’s art collection and the pair have “six new ideas” to work on between now and Christmas, so they’ve got a lot on. Look out for those distinctive circles.


LINKS:
www.robandnick.com
Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street W1 www.faslondon.com.
The limited edition Royal Parks deckchair is available for sale at www.deckchairdreams.org