The work begins in motion
These paintings only fully exist when you move. They generate a field in flux: as you shift position, the mica-based orbs change colour, edges dissolve and reappear, alignments form and fall apart. Red turns to blue, blue to violet; reflections rearrange what you think you see. No fixed image is waiting underneath. Each encounter is a temporary configuration shaped by light, angle and attention.
The composition does not pre-exist in my mind as a picture. It is completed in perception, in the way your gaze travels through the field.
Structure and Apophenia
The central forms are built to trigger apophenia: your tendency to find patterns in ambiguous material. They are not illustrations of an image I had in advance. They arise from pressure, rhythm and material response, from decisions made in relation to what is already on the panel, not to an external picture.
The paint is structured just enough for your perception to start guessing. Faces, landscapes, cosmic scenes or diagrams may appear, but they are not placed there as motifs. They are the result of your own pattern-making. The painting works when you notice that process in yourself.
The orbs as anchors
The orbs are not symbols; they are anchors of relation. Their size, spacing, colour and position create a rhythm that holds the composition in balance. Each orb adjusts the others. Small shifts in placement change the entire field.
Together they organise how your eye moves. They pull your attention along certain paths and hold it at specific tensions. What feels like a latent system in the painting is this network of relations, not a hidden image behind the surface.
Beauty as suspicion of a system
What you register as beauty in these works is often the moment when scattered elements suddenly feel coherent. A rhythm locks in, tensions line up, colour and form seem to agree without telling you why. That sensation is your brain rewarding itself for detecting structure.
For me, beauty is the suspicion of a hidden system: the sense that something is right without knowing the rule. The paintings stay at that edge. They do not resolve into a single reading. Instead, they keep reopening the field of possible meanings each time you think you have found one.
Surface, depth and attention
The epoxy layer refracts and reflects light so that a flat panel behaves like a shallow space. As you move, highlights slide, shadows shift and colours deepen or fade. The same painting can appear dense and dark from one angle and almost weightless from another.
This optical depth mirrors a cognitive one. You do not simply look at the work; you explore it. Your gaze tests alignments, revises interpretations, follows glimmers of sense. The surface becomes a place where attention thickens.
Your role in the work
These paintings are not passive objects. They function as probes of how you construct meaning from incomplete information. What seems evocative or loaded is not fixed content I have placed there, but the result of how you relate to form, tension and relation. Each projection you make becomes part of the work’s structure; your search for sense becomes part of the painting’s logic.
I begin without a story to tell. The work takes shape through action: adding, removing, shifting, sealing. When you stand in front of it, that process continues in perception. You are not an external observer, but part of the configuration. The painting unfolds through your presence, in the way you cannot help but make sense.
The subject of the painting is not a figure in the image, but a cognitive condition brought into view.
Stephan Konings
More about the work:
The Suspicion of a Hidden System, a structural reading