Between odd to daily moments, Nicolai is provoked by his subjects with a rare mix of glorious fascination and eerie darkness.

From 2019, Nicolai has photographed a huge number of scenes from his travels. Acting as art director, artist, and viewer, he captures images like stills from a movie. In this exhibition he is using some of these first imageries visualizing stories of humans, society, and nature with an almost metamorphic touch. Slightly deceiving the visual system with his colors, details, and angles he draws a parallel to his admiration for the cuttlefish chromatophores; to camouflage to hunt, to avoid predators, but also to communicate. The way the cuttlefish is master at altering its appearance to blend into their surroundings, humans do the same by uniforming, adapting to society, social norms, and expectations. The cuttlefish wear their thoughts on their skin, while humans wear their thoughts and feelings within...

‘It has never been about digitally recording a subject – it is about capturing what I see. The camera is just one of many tools I use. The photograph isn’t really what I photographed, It’s more of a transformation’- Victor Nicolai.

‘Chroma’ follows Nicolai’s ongoing repertoire of curious color sense, blurring, cropping, enlarging, revealing a hallucinatory strangeness from the back of his mind, giving a certain si-fi to seemingly classic art forms. He often uses psychological undertones to produce a pleasant aesthetic in his work, which manifests strange and unfamiliar situations. By using, for some, visually clichés, 'Chroma' is meant to be an eye opener; the viewer is invited to understand the situations that are imposed on us - as well as those we impose on ourselves.

18.3 - 10.4.22

Fotogalleri Vasli Souza, Damplassen 21, 0852, Oslo.