Grand Street Project #3

“Beauty is a primeval phenomenon, which itself never makes its appearance, but the reflection of which is visible in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind, and is as various as nature herself.”

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Carsten Fleck finds beauty in unlikely places. Well maybe not that unlikely as Fleck’s most recent work, Trash, Grand Street, was made from the rubbish he found walking the Williamsburg street he lives on. Fleck sees beauty where others might miss it, and oftentimes when the very things themselves seem invisible, they are no longer wanted — officially they are trash and the original function is lost. Under Fleck’s unflinching eye this random detritus is transmogrified into organized objects of wonder.

Many artists have challenged our perceptions of value by creating images of things scavenged or abandoned — Irving Penn’s Ginkgo Leaves, New York 1990 ennoble two colored leaves — and similarly in these new colored prints, we are shown more than sweepings, but drawn into Fleck’s way of seeing by a combination of skill and nerve. Fleck presents these arbitrary and valueless objects as isolated matter now made precious when laid on pristine, white paper and shot in super-startling focus so that all preconceptions of disgust or revulsion are irrelevant. Dirt, decay and decomposition are tamed, even decontaminated by Fleck’s fantastical focus and lush encapsulation. This hyper-clarity gives the objects openness, even a flatness reminiscent of a Warhol soup can. These once intimate objects (condom, glove, beer bottle alike) are captured in such fearless detail that we almost see through them: what we do see is a fixed state of transition, scrap captured in a moment of brief and frail existence, pausing in the moment of its death throes. Once familiar, this abandoned debris is now given new conversance, only this time it’s poster- sized, sanitized from the street, luxurious in color, engorged in scale, magnificent forever. Worthlessness is brought back to life — in detail, in texture, in color, in shape — while presumably the original is thrown back on the scrap heap.

Printed C41 on Fujicolor Crystal Archive DP II (220g/m²) Velvet paper by WhiteWall.

Open, unsigned edition.

Free shipping to Europe and to the US.