Machiel van Soest
Noise

Noise — EN

Text accompanying the series Noise.

The Noise Works series represents chaos and abstraction through the absence of clear signals and structured forms. These paintings are characterized by scattered dots and textured surfaces that evoke visual noise, as color and form dissolve into a field of disorder. The series explores the potential for form to emerge from this chaos and embodies the concept of “unborn manifestation,” in which ideas and structures have yet to take shape. By confronting viewers with this fragmented visual landscape, Noise Works challenges traditional notions of composition and invites reflection on chance, entropy, and the creative process itself. In the Noise works—the “un-ground”—visual noise appears as a primal field from which patterns and images can flare into view. A magnified microcosm of color and vibration evokes the ever-present background noise from which perception, memory, and image-making continually reorganize themselves. The paintings render paint as solid matter—material image-noise—or as the visual radiation of mass, and, on an almost scientific level, present reality as wave motion and energetic vibrations at the atomic scale. The term “noise” is likened to unformed sound: from this noise unfolds a spectrum of color that symbolizes unarticulated emotion—the passage from pure energy into something we, as humans, can perceive or feel. The series embodies the philosophical idea that the energetic and material states of existence are one: matter is energy, or “congealed light.” The Noise series can be compared to the static “snow” of an old television: from a distance it seems like a random slurry of gray interference, but up close you see that this noise is the source from which every image and every color arises. It is the “heartbeat” of matter before it takes on a recognizable form or meaning—an investigation into the vibrating substratum of the world, where the boundary between tangible matter and fleeting energy begins to blur.