Part of a series exploring apophenic structure and reflective resonance.
A reading of Phaëthon and the structures beneath appearance.
Against a lustrous black field, an amorphous, molten form undulates across Stephan Konings’s Phaëthon (2024), its surface catching light in flecks of gold and silver. Orbiting this central mass, a constellation of coloured orbs in emerald, violet, blue, orange, silvery grey and black punctuates the composition with rhythmic precision. Together they stage what the artist calls a “suspicion of hidden systems”: a sense that the painting is organised by rules that never fully show themselves.
The work operates through what Konings calls apophenic structure, the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in ambiguous visual data. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, Phaëthon creates a field of possibilities in which viewers project their own associations. The central form might suggest a cosmic event, a geological formation or an organic growth; the floating orbs might read as planets, cells or portals. This interpretive fluidity is not a side-effect but the core of the work’s structure.
Material structure and perceptual flux
Konings’s technical approach amplifies these concerns through specific material choices. Working on an aluminium panel, he builds the central form with layered metallic pigments that create dense, stratified textures. The coloured orbs use mica-based interference pigments that shift chromatically as viewers move, so that no two encounters with the painting are identical.
A final epoxy resin coating creates optical depth and seals the composition under a crystalline surface. This skin both protects and alters what lies beneath: reflections slide across the image, highlights migrate, and the apparent geometry of the work changes with each shift in position or light. Phaëthon functions less as a static picture than as a situation in which the image keeps reconfiguring itself in time.
This material strategy serves the work’s investigation of perception and hidden order. As light conditions change throughout the day, different constellations of relation become visible. The painting does not reveal a single definitive image, but a succession of alignments that make the underlying structure felt rather than declared.
Mythic resonance without illustration
The title invokes the Greek myth of Phaëthon, the youth who loses control of his father Helios’ sun chariot and brings the sky to the edge of catastrophe. Konings abstracts this narrative into energy and form. The painting does not depict chariot, horses or falling bodies; instead it distils ambition, loss of control and irreversible consequence into a precarious balance between cohesion and fragmentation.
In a present marked by environmental and social strain, this mythic reference inevitably gains contemporary resonance. The Phaëthon story can be read as a reflection on hubris and planetary risk, but the painting does not illustrate a thesis. Any such readings arise from the tension between form and field, not from symbolic coding.
Context within contemporary painting
Phaëthon intersects several currents in contemporary abstraction. Its emphasis on the viewer’s changing experience links it to approaches that treat perception itself as material. Its allusive, cosmic register echoes a renewed interest in myth and cosmology as frameworks for abstract painting. At the same time, its layered metallic grounds and interference pigments place it in conversation with practices that foreground process, surface and temporality.
The work shows how traditional painting media can engage questions of perception, pattern and meaning without abandoning visual intensity. It invites both immediate, sensory looking and slower, structural reading; neither level is treated as secondary.
Beauty as suspicion of a hidden system
A key to the work lies in the artist’s notion that beauty is the suspicion of a hidden system, the moment when elements suddenly feel coherent without revealing the rule that binds them. In Phaëthon, that sensation arises when the orbs, the central mass and the black field briefly lock into a configuration that “makes sense” before slipping away again.
The deep black ground functions not as mere emptiness but as an active field that heightens every other element. It withholds explicit information while sharpening contrasts of colour, scale and distance. What appears as emptiness is the space in which the painting’s implied order operates.
In this sense, the subject of Phaëthon is not a represented scene but a mode of perception. The work sustains a tension between clarity and indeterminacy that rewards both brief encounter and extended contemplation, holding the viewer at the point where structure is strongly felt but never completely given.