Carsten Becker

Simulacrum, by Patrick Alt

Is it possible to cope with loss or to process specific repressed memories by reviving repressed color worlds, the lost worlds of images? Carsten Becker‘s works are about the „absence“ of something, about voids.

Simulacrum

Patrick Alt, Aug. 2019

Is it possible to cope with loss or to process specific repressed memories by reviving repressed color worlds, the lost worlds of images? Carsten Becker‘s works are about the „absence“ of something, about voids.

They show the cut-down realities of past image worlds, connoted with certain feelings that also connect to a nostalgic (and perverse) longing. By reviving these realities in his series RAL and Agfacolor, Becker creates a substitute for that which has been lost: a simulacrum to render the repressed experienceable and tangible again.

The image worlds of his Agfacolor series were originally constructed by means of specific colors (Agfacolor color coding) on the one hand and by framing mechanisms (the selection of a specific motif) on the other. A rhizome-like, gigantic narrative, an enormous apparatus emerging from the many pictures taken by soldiers in all countries, was being developed, governed, and controlled. This process came to a close at the end of World War II.

Rather than addressing the actual motif of a particular image (e.g. a landscape depiction, Tunis, etc.), the focus lies on the framework of its genesis. Becker’s work is a representation of the search for those images that were once generated out of a certain mindset or a discernable motive and are now returned to the world in the form of Becker‘s photographic prints, separated from their original author. At the same time, this process is accompanied by a departure from the search for the classical motif itself.

Patrick Alt is a visual artist and is living in Berlin.

Translation: Philipp Multhaupt

Series/Serien

Agfacolor

RAL