Len Faki:
Darkness as Shelter

When I look at Armin Boehm’s paintings, I recognize in them something that’s been familiar to me for decades—not as a concrete memory, but as a state. It’s this hard-to-grasp feeling that arises when space, body, sound and time shift into one other. Club culture doesn’t come from music alone. It comes from repetition, from rhythm, from the conscious dissolution of control. Techno doesn’t work narratively, but cyclically. It sets bodies in motion. In Armin’s paintings, I find this same impulse: figures that aren’t clearly located anywhere, spaces that dissolve or compress, a permanent in-between. Nothing’s fixed; everything’s in motion—even when it seems to be standing still.

Armin Boehm, LIKE A DREAM… OF A WAR… IN A BERGHAIN ORGY, 2026

The club is a place fraught with tension. It’s humanity under laboratory conditions: between individuality and the crowd, between control and loss of control, between ecstasy and exhaustion. This tension isn’t a side effect; it’s the actual driving force. Whoever dances gives themselves up to a rhythm that’s greater than themselves, without completely dissolving in it. In Armin’s works, I feel exactly this fragile balance. Bodies often seem vulnerable and yet strong, fragmented and yet present. They aren’t decorative; they demand something from the viewer. His images show excess, but they retain an observational depth. When I play a set, I’m simultaneously part of the ecstasy and its director. I see the faces in the strobe light—fragments of emotion that appear in Armin’s collages in exactly the same way. Club culture has always been a space for me where social roles, at least temporarily, lose their significance. Origin, status, expectations: all of this becomes secondary when the sound of the bass structures the space. In Armin’s paintings, I see similar spaces of freedom. They don’t show clear identities, but states of being. People in transition, in process, in the moment of losing themselves and finding themselves anew. As a DJ, I spend my life creating spaces where time doesn’t matter. Armin does the same with oil on canvas. 

What particularly attracts me is the darkness in Armin’s works. Not as something threatening, but as a sanctuary. Clubs have always been places of the night, and not by accident. Darkness allows things that wouldn’t be possible in glaring light. It creates intimacy, anonymity, closeness. Armin’s painting doesn’t use this darkness to conceal, but to intensify. It forces you to look more closely, to slow down, to engage. Club culture always exists only in the present; you can’t preserve it, nor fully document it, you can only remember it or recreate it. Perhaps this is the strongest connection between Armin’s painting and the club world: both are about moments that in reality can’t be captured—and yet they try. Not to possess them, but to carry their energy forward.