For many people, Carl Kleiner's vibrant, geometric photos appear to be little more than interesting collages of shapes and colors. But anyone who lives and breathes art sees meticulously crafted sculptures. It's the combination of design, sculpture, and photography that makes the work so interesting, an analog technique for the digital age.
Kleiner's work has inspired artists and designers, prompted H&M and Ikea to hire him, and had Google eager to have him produce interesting, but non-intrusive, app and browser backdrops. The result was a series of beautiful images too complex to exist in the background.
"When presenting a few early compositions to the creative department [at Google], the main problem for them was the depth and gradients in these images," Kleiner says. "But during my experiments in the studio a visual language started to take shape that became the series There Will Be Blood."
Though Google took a pass on the first set of images, Kleiner decided to make the complicated, paper cut photos a personal project. There Will Be Blood makes paper, typically so benign, downright menacing with its sharp edges, stark contrast and bright colors. Kleiner bends, folds and cuts the raw material into random shapes, then stacks them in differing layers and angles. The sculptures are lit with intense, direct light to give them a final punch when photographed.
"It has always been a reproduction approach – photographing the pieces," Kleiner says. "This time I used the camera as a tool in the process of making the compositions, and suddenly light, depth and shadows became key players."
The title comes from Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film --- a dark, brooding, oil-baron epic---but the series is equally inspired by modern art. Painter Lee Lozano is a major influence, and there are flashes of minimalist painters Carmen Herrera and Ellsworth Kelly in the sharp geometry of his photographs.
The thread that ties the pieces together, Kleiner says, is the sense of violence. Rarely has paper appeared so imposing as it does in There Will Be Blood. Everything is razor sharp---even photos with softer color schemes are somewhat unsettling, with corners and edges that seem capable of breaking skin. "My ambition was to create violent or at least aggressive compositions," he says. "I want to hit the spot where the composition just shakes you."
