On the Saturday night of Notte Bianca Lejl Imdawwal, visitors to Valletta are encouraged to wear white or carry white accessories as they enter City Gate. On that night, this structure will be bathed in the creative formations of ultra-violet lights as expressed by Sicilian artist Gaspare Di Caro.

“The aim of the technique that I’ll be using for the visual installation, called ‘UV-VLT’, is to highlight details in architecture in order to produce an extraordinary and magic dimension. City Gate will be seen totally different on that night,” explained Di Caro. Recently, Di Caro created these effects, which he technically describes as comedia de la luz, on the Cibeles and Neptune fountains at Madrid and Caja Duero Bank office building in Salamanca, Spain.

Inspired by commedia dell’ arte, comedia de la luz equips monuments, fountains and buildings with a mask of light. In the same way as the mask in the commedia dell’arte connects the various points of the face to transform it and give it a new perception, the comedia de la luz transforms monuments and fountains into new prospects, encouraging the public to view these structures in an innovative way.

Described by the Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo as El pintor de la luz (the painter of light), Di Caro has an understandable affinity with Caravaggio. In fact, his other project for this year’s edition of Notte Bianca Lejl Imdawwal is to cover the façade of St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta with changing images of paintings by Caravaggio.

“Gaspare Di Caro’s love for Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro technique leads him to use architectural structures and façades as a palette on which the artist mixes colour lights with both great imagination and dramatic effect,” said one art critic of his visual installations.