Alva_noto Aka Carsten Nicolai

The exhibition, 'Funken' by Carsten Nicolai takes as its theme, the behaviour of sparks.
Using the medium of photography, Carsten Nicolai follows the traces and patterns of light and how these formations split up and spread outwards through the air. Through this, the viewer is presented with a series of exploratory images.
Nicolais’s use of photography is at the same time revelatory and investigative.
Revelatory in the sense that the photographs give visibility to the spark traces, holding them and stilling their motion for prolonged viewing. For better observatory purposes, the artist has inverted the tones to give us a highly graphical image in negative. The yellows of the flames become blue, the black of the surrounding darkness turns pure white. In their inverse state, the spark structures begin to remind us of grasses or floral elements or of intuitive calligraphic drawings.
The photographs investigative processes focus on the random angles made as the sparks divide in the air and become tree-like in their structure. In a series of overlaid drawings through which the original photographs are still visible, Carsten Nicolai examines these random angles with hand drawn black lines to assess their geometric properties.
With these recent photographs, Carsten Nicolai's interest into the analysis of mathematical patterns displayed in previous works: 'Milch' and 'Snow Noise' continues.
'Funken' is a hybrid study of the random behaviour of light and a search for regularity in nature. NOISE.