John Carstens
I feel the world is not directly observed but rather inferred from the mind’s interpretation of sensory experiences. Perception versus “reality”. Viewpoint versus “truth”.
John Carstens works at the intersection of mathematics, architecture, and painting — a practice he calls Algorithmic Divisionism: the translation of conventional imagery into intricate geometric fields through custom-built algorithms, rendered by hand in layers of pigmented acrylic ink.
Origins
John Carstens’ path to painting was never a straight line, and he doesn’t consider that a detour — he considers it the foundation. Over a forty-year career spanning architecture, desktop publishing, and computer programming, he taught himself each discipline in turn, absorbing the logic of structural drawing, the precision of typesetting, and the systems-thinking of code. Painting, when he arrived at it, wasn’t a break from that history — it was the point where all of it converged. As he puts it: “I applied everything I learned since I was born.”
That sentence isn’t a figure of speech. Every image John Carstens makes passes through the same process that shaped his earlier careers: an original photograph or reference is fed through image-editing and CAD software running his own algorithms, which reduce it into networks of interlocking geometric forms. What was once continuous tone becomes discrete, calculated structure — the same underlying move divisionist painters made over a century ago, when they separated color into individual units and let the eye recombine them. John Carstens’ separation happens first in code, then again in ink.
The Divisionist Lineage — Rebuilt
Classical divisionism was, at its core, a scientific proposition: colors placed as discrete units beside one another, rather than premixed, would fuse more vividly in the viewer’s perception than paint mixed on a palette ever could. It was theory as much as technique — a claim about how the eye and mind construct a whole from separated parts.
Algorithmic Divisionism inherits that proposition and rebuilds it for a different toolkit. Instead of color divided by hand into brushstrokes, Carstens’ units are geometric forms divided by algorithm — modular, mathematically derived, and only reassembled into legible imagery once the viewer’s eye does its work. The result sits deliberately on the boundary between abstraction and figuration: close up, a field of pattern and structure; from a distance, an image resolves. The work is, in effect, an ongoing study of how much information the eye needs before randomness becomes recognition — and how little needs to change before recognition dissolves back into pattern.
Materials and Process
John Carstens’ chosen medium is pigmented acrylic ink, selected for its saturated color, transparency, and lightfastness. He mixes it with acrylic gloss gel medium, building the ink up in layers to achieve a dense, almost plexiglass-like finish — a surface with real physical depth, not just printed color.
To apply it, he adapted the traditional pochoir stencil method — historically a paper-based technique — using vinyl instead. Paper can’t hold up to the thickness of gel-bound ink layered repeatedly over the same surface; vinyl can. It’s a small material substitution with a large practical consequence, and a fitting example of John Carstens’ broader method: taking an established technique and re-engineering it until it can carry a new kind of image.
What the Work Is About
Beyond process, Algorithmic Divisionism is an inquiry into perception itself — into the human compulsion to find pattern inside randomness, and the fragile, shifting line between what we recognize as a picture and what we simply see as structure. Rooted equally in mathematics and design, the work asks viewers to notice the moment their own eye does the assembling — the same optical participation classical divisionism demanded, now staged through an entirely contemporary, computational lens.
John Carstens’ original artwork and apparel are available through his online store.