The special color, actually a term from printing technology, is poetically reinterpreted by Johannes Kersting. It is a special case of the visual, an irritating ricochet that stands outside the usual system, a strange color. Kersting's concern is to break up visual routines and to confront images whose nature does not allow a clear answer to the question of whether they are depicted reality, constructed order, or fragmentary montage. Here, "perception encounters itself in a peculiar way." In a medial state of suspension, elements of photography, painting as well as object art are incorporated. The starting point of the artistic process is usually photography, whose creative potential is measured by its reality content and precisely by its colorfulness:

"What resonates is a diffuse unease. It must be said that in the photographic works of Johannes Kersting, color resonates as a moment of tension that subtly reflects our disorientation. This is precisely where a fascination lies."

For within photography, but also beyond it, colors reveal the ability to disrupt or even undermine the spatial structure and to put the photographic image's promise of reality to the test. Painting is granted more freedom in this respect, but it, too, is being tested against the regularities of our perceptual conventions. 

Taken literally, the term 'special color' also contains the 'special', which also means the 'special', the 'extraordinary'. And extraordinary is color in photography in such a conciseness and radiance as Johannes Kersting uses it; extraordinary is also the use of color in the architectural findings that Kersting processes in his compositions and that can be found everywhere: in urban space, on a rusty rod, in the surprising chiaroscuro of a weathered wall or the faded plastic of an advertising sign. These elements hold an astonishing moment of irritation, if one detaches them photographically from their real context. In Kersting's 'extended photographs' they in turn not only metaphorically but quite literally break the frame of the picture and become defectors of the image back in the physical world.

Small, everyday observations, details of unspectacular utilitarian architecture and unusual lighting situations come together to form a puzzling puzzle of observation, new pictorial inventions of virtual reality, of digital space do their part to subvert the viewer's comprehension. Ultimately, it remains to be said that "Johannes Kersting follows an exploratory will to wrest new aspects from the specific traditions of painting and photography and to transfer them into a liberated concept of the image."