If anything characterises the works of Carsten Beck (Denmark, 1986), it is his ability to turn something simple into something interesting. Based on a minimalist aesthetic true to the basis of concrete art, Beck creates his work through meticulously outlined geometries which are detached from any symbolic association. In RAW, the artist’s first exhibition in Spain, we attend to the display of an ordered, sober art, devoid of ornamentation, which seems to deal with forms and figures in their rawest state.

Carsten Beck‘s work echoes the legacy of concrete artists such as Max Bill and Carmen Herrera, her being one of his greatest influences. He not only shares Herrera’s simplicity and desire to reduce the artwork to its most refined and essential form, but he shares also the imprint that architecture and space leave on his pieces. Although Beck is not graduated in architecture, he takes architecture, its angles and perspectives as a source of inspiration for the sketches that later articulate his canvases. An interest that he carries into his multifaceted practice and develops beyond the paintbrush in his design studio.

His paintings are an ode to form for form’s sake, a defence of the artistic value of the piece beyond any external interpretation or stimuli. For this very reason, in all his works his pictorial vocabulary is perfectly recognisable, a language made up of symmetrical and asymmetrical geometries that fluctuate between black and white, always maintaining skillfully an austere balance.

Alba Alarcos Veiga