Just using black and white colours, Cartier take us in his deepest personal world made of lines, homages to the futurist poetics and cyber-inspired aesthetic.
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Carson Cartier (click here to discover all his works on Kooness) is an abstract Canadian artist, based in Vancouver, who seeks to unify painting, photography and fashion through his personal research. We will focus on his painting production and on the convergence of a cyber-inspired aesthetic with the classic human gesture of painting.
Cartier employs untraditional painting tools and methods in order to create compositions that look at the dencity and materiality of the colour and at the speed of the lines as well, almost as if his works were digitally produced. His paintings are infact the result of a special encounter between the painter's human gesture and an aesthetic inspired by a new age of technological advancement. After the Second World War the information technology has seen an acceleration of its developments and nowdays we are all inextricably linked to our electronic devices. A new interpretation of modern life is what Cartier offers his audience, using a minimalist aesthetic that nevertheless communicates the complexity of its research.
We could explain the artist's attraction to this type of aesthetics by following two paths: on the one hand, the artist lived through the era of the great technological transformations, since the nineties onwards, with the advent of computers and the birth of World Wide Web; on the other, he inspired himself looking at the art history, at the historical avant-garde and specifically Italian Futurism.
If you do not know the past, you cannot consciously look at the future. It is a statement that well embodies Cartier's poetics. He seeks progress and innovation in his artistic practice, without denying the great artistic achievements of the historical avant-garde movements of the early 20th century.
From an exclusively executive point of view, his artistic language is deliberately simple, he only uses black and white as colours, emphasising lines, the undoubted main characters of his works. His continuous pursuit of a clean, linear visual language with a focus on movement is therefore a clear reference to the linear aesthetic vision of the Futurist painters, who were also interested in issues such as speed, movement, technological progress and innovation.
Indeed, the artist often invokes Futurist philosophy in his personal writings and in the titles of his paintings, just like in the Futurism Series where the black background brings to the foreground the thin, oblique white lines, symbolising the dynamism so praised by the Futurist artists.
In the Collection Series instead, straight lines gradually give way to the flexuousness of more or less accentuated curved lines, in a game of chasing each other. Using only black and white at all times, the lines gradually thicken in some works, moving from the thin lines of Collection 04 to the thicker, more sinuous lines of Collection 01.
His works therefore appear to be abstract, apparently simple to decode, but the more expert eye can see the complexity of Cartier's research, the meeting of past and present, the homage to Futurism and Norbert Wiener's cybernetic theory, all to be inserted into the artist's skilful use of just two colours, capable of restoring the complexity of the lines that are the protagonists of his paintings.
However, the inspiration to create such refined and contemporary artworks also comes from the ability to listen to his own creativity, his inner self, in relation to external stimuli such as music, subcultures and nuances of humankind as a whole.
Discover more about Carson Cartier and IdeelArt on Kooness.com