The work refuses you first
To look at these paintings is to enter unstable ground. They resist passive viewing. The mica-colored orbs shift with your movement: red turns blue, blue turns violet; forms dissolve; patterns break and reassemble. The image never settles. It’s disruption, but generative, like a system in motion. What emerges is not what was painted, but what unfolds in the shifting perception of light.
The work demands that you abandon the comfortable fiction of a stable image. What you see depends on where you stand, and that instability is the point.
Don’t expect the painting to hold still for your interpretation.
Recognition without source
The central forms in my work exploit apophenia, your brain’s compulsive drive to find patterns in the chaotic material of paint. You’ll see faces, landscapes, cosmic events, biological processes. These aren’t happy accidents or gentle invitations to personal meaning-making. They are precise manipulations of your cognitive apparatus.
The structure I’ve developed in the paint triggers these responses systematically. You think you’re discovering something, but what’s actually revealed is you: your perceptual biases, your associative reflexes, your urgent need for the world to make sense.
The orbs speak a language you don’t know
The colored orbs resonate with the central form. Through their colors, sizes, positions, and relative distances, they generate a web of relations that aligns with the apophatic structure beneath, more reverberation than explanation.
This isn’t about my personal reading imposed onto randomness. It’s about discovering relationships that were already latent in the material. The orbs don’t say what the central form means; they amplify the suspicion that meaning is present without ever naming it.
You sense coherence in these relationships, in the way the green orb holds its place, precisely offset from the reddish one. Their sizes establish a specific rhythm. The constellation as a whole feels inevitable rather than arbitrary. But the system remains unspoken, unresolved.
Beauty is a cognitive trap
What you experience as beauty in these works is actually the suspicion of a hidden system, your brain rewarding you for sensing patterns and coherence that may not exist. This is not a gentle aesthetic experience but a demonstration of how meaning-making functions as a survival mechanism.
False positives are how you survive. Meaning is your most elegant error. The moment you fully understand this mechanism, the aesthetic experience should collapse, yet somehow it doesn’t.
The surface lies to you
The epoxy creates an illusion of depth, making you feel as though you’re looking into rather than at the painting. This physical effect mirrors the conceptual deception at work. You think you’re penetrating to some essential meaning, but you’re actually being held at the surface, mesmerized by the very mechanism of your own perception.
The paintings open a perceptual field in which meaning emerges, shaped by what you bring, what draws your attention, and what remains unresolved.
You are the subject
These works function as mirrors, but not in any comforting sense.
They reflect back your cognitive limitations, your interpretive compulsions, your inability to rest in meaninglessness.
The “content” of each painting is not defined by what I put there, but by what you cannot help but project onto it.The paintings succeed when they make visible the invisible processes by which you construct reality from insufficient data.
Resistance is the method
I begin each work without predetermined meaning because meaning is what happens, not what I communicate. The work succeeds through resistance: to interpretation, to stability, to the comfort of understood significance.
What remains is the suspicion of a hidden system. Discomfort is not distance. It is a trace of wonder, a silent tremor, where aletheia moves beneath perception.
Stephan Konings
More about the work:
The Suspicion of a Hidden System, a structural reading