Energy Fields / Selection Part 1

Paintings on balinese cardboards with ashes and sand.

Energy Fields / Selection Part 2

Paintings on balinese cardboards with ashes and sand.

Schwarzarbeit Part 1 / Selection

Between the everything and the nothing is the diversity. And-, although we try to order and understand diversity in a continuous process, we will never decipher its causality. This work is created with black pigments and sand on recycled wood panels. Each strip in the strip is engraved by hand.

The Sound of the Hidden

The lines that Christian Lichtenberg places in the picture continue those lines that the artist began long ago. With these lines he is on the road, as one who follows nomadic principles, as one who follows his paths in a labyrinthine network and follows the traces.

Lichtenberg's travels are reflected in a photographic archive. However, it can take years before individual images are released from this fund, regain consciousness and enter into new contexts. Arranged in series, the photographs reveal a concentration on the essential not only because of their reduced coloration. With the choice of the point of view and the specific perspective on the slide-visible world, images crystallize out of a non-binding stream through the camera's viewfinder. Line structures become visible, such as the staccato of lines from a mown corn field, the dissonant line formations of reeds, the precise lines of a Japanese rock garden, or the chaotic tracks of a motorcycle in the sand, whose network of tracks runs through the entire picture space. The dynamics of these lines, whether organically grown or artificially created, aim at something energetic, which is not captured but activated by Christian Lichtenberg. Memories of invisible concatenations of energy and information flows, of networks of relationships and patterns of action come to mind. Lichtenberg creates transparency and clears the view for special cognitive abilities of visible phenomena, whereby he focuses less on interpretation than on the sound of the hidden.

At the same time, his photographic works pose questions of symmetry, rhythm and structure in variation to the painterly models, while the material boundaries of painting and photography are increasingly blurred in the digital processing and printing process.

Christian Lichtenberg's principle of mediation between media, on the other hand, is based less on materialism and composition and more on the search for a balance point that brings the impressions of the outer world into balance with the inner nature and a personal sign repertoire. If as a photographer he withdraws behind the phenomena, always present without being explicit, as a painter he literally inscribes himself in the black pigments in order to combine his reduced pictorial language with the visible materiality of the picture ground.Carved into the wood as a white trace on a black background, the individual lines join together to form regularly arranged compositions of strokes that push beyond the cut-out character of the picture field and integrate the work into an imaginary whole.

In Christian Lichtenberg's minimalist black-and-white pictures, his view of the world condenses into an iconic structure that continually tells of silence, clarity, and emptiness, but also of chaotic-productive fusions and the concentration of forces.

Katrin Steffen (Art critics)

Schwarzarbeit Part 2

Abstrich / X - Rays on Linen

I once lived in an abandoned women's hospital that I could use temporarily for three years. Everything that the doctors could no longer use, they left there. In the basement of the hospital I found an archive with X-Rays and in a library old doctors' books. I combined the linen covers of the doctor's books with the X-Rays to create abstract images. The aesthetically beautiful, contains the abyss of the destructive. A polarity that often runs invisibly through my work.