ROB & NICK CARTER: 12 LUMINOGRAMS

About

Rob and Nick Carter´s recent work consists of twelve ´luminograms´-slightly elongated portrait format panels of pure colour that have been arranged into one installation and set in the historic context of The Fine Art Society. The exhibition is the culmination and refinement of a decade of experimenting with the photogram, on the border of painting and photography, which has resulted in the gradual distillation of referential figurative elements, and the production of richly associative minimal works. Subtle and immaculate, the works glow with the materiality of evanescent pure colour, providing an experience of ´indeterminate space´.

The term ´luminogram´ is one coined by the artists from medical science to convey the fact that the ´monochrome´ colour panels have been produced solely by exposing photographic paper to light which has been filtered through a specific choice of coloured gels that all require different and accurate amounts of light. The colour modulations are orientated around blue, green, orange and purple and developed out of the artists´ fascination with the orange/blue complementarity of Goethe´s colour circle.

The Carters have proposed that the works function as self portraits, where the viewer is stimulated to create their own reading of the sensation from their personal stock of associations of memory. And like a portrait it is the filter of seeing, the viewing condition that each individual brings to a work, which reveals the scale of the possibilities of interpretation. And yet the luminogram work-through the inclusion of the gradual modulation of the light source-also has the sense of landscape, of a place which the viewer can inhabit mentally and spiritually.

This body of work epitomises their belief in the strength of pure colour for which their chosen medium of cibachrome is so suited. This is their second show at the Fine Art Society and marks the culmination and maturing of their light paintings over the last ten years.