For future reference, the problem was basically that your light was encompassing the geometry. The way area lights work in almost all render engines, the standard inverse square falloff cause a lot of problems when the light is too close to the surface. At the intersection point between an area light and a surface, it’s basically impossible to get clean results. It’s often better to solve this kind of situation either by making damned sure that the light does not intersect, or by using two different lights and exclusion/inclusion flags, so you can have one smaller light illuminating the candle stick and one larger light illuminating the scene.
Area light shape graininess!
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