The Work in the Field

I start without an image. I begin with action: adding, removing, shifting, sealing. I stop when something locks in that I cannot fully explain. That moment of recognition is not the same as understanding. It is closer to suspicion.

These paintings disclose themselves as you move. The mica-based interference pigments, organised into orb-like forms, sometimes shift colour as your position changes: reds slide toward blue, blues toward violet. Edges dissolve and reappear. Alignments form, hold briefly, then fall apart. There is no single fixed image underneath waiting to be revealed. What you see is a temporary configuration shaped by light, angle and your own attention. The composition resolves in perception, not in my studio.

Structure and Apophenia

I work with apophenia, the tendency to find pattern in ambiguous material. The central forms are not illustrations of something I envisioned; they arise from pressure, rhythm and material response, from decisions made in relation to what is already on the panel. The paint is structured just enough for your perception to begin guessing. Faces, landscapes, diagrams may appear. I did not paint them as subjects. They appear for you.

The orbs as anchors

The orbs anchor the field. They are not symbols. Their size, spacing, colour and position create a relational rhythm; each one adjusts the others, and small shifts in placement change everything. Together they organise how your eye moves, pulling attention along certain paths and holding it at specific tensions. What feels like an implied order in the painting is this network of relations, not a hidden image behind the surface. The system is in the surface.

Beauty as suspicion of a system

Beauty here is the moment scattered elements suddenly feel coherent, when rhythm holds and colour and form agree without stating why. I have learned not to resolve it. The paintings stay at that edge, reopening the field of possible meanings each time you think you have found one.

Surface, depth and attention

The epoxy layer makes a flat panel behave like a shallow space. From one angle the work appears dense and dark; from another, almost weightless. That optical depth invites a different kind of looking: attention thickens, your gaze tests alignments, revises interpretations, follows glimmers of sense.

Your role in the work

These paintings function as probes into how you construct meaning from incomplete information, how quickly perception fills a gap with a story, how that story keeps changing. What feels loaded is not content I placed there. It is how you relate to form, tension and rhythm. Each projection you make becomes part of the work’s structure.

When you stand in front of one of these paintings, the process that shaped it continues in you.

Looking is the final act.

The subject of the painting is not a figure in the image, but a condition brought into view.

Stephan Konings

More about the work:

The Suspicion of a Hidden System, a structural reading