Stephan Konings is a Dutch visual artist based in Amsterdam. He makes paintings on aluminium panels with layered metallic pigments, interference mica, orb-like forms and epoxy. As light and viewing angle change, the relations within the painting shift. Colour, depth and balance are read differently from one position to the next.

Konings has aphantasia. He works from pressure, rhythm, tension and balance rather than from inner pictures. A single panel can go through months of adding, removing and resealing before it holds. The composition emerges through that process and holds together.

For Konings, beauty is the suspicion of a hidden system: it appears when something feels coherent without fully giving itself away. He works close to that threshold, where structure is sensed before it is fully known.

Konings graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 1999. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions, is represented by Gallery 238 in Amsterdam, and is held in private collections in the Netherlands and abroad.

Artist statement

I begin without a story to tell. I work without a fixed image or goal. I stop when further intervention would no longer deepen the painting. What you bring to the work is as much a part of it as what I leave there. I seal the surface in the studio. The work completes itself in looking.

Alongside the paintings, I write texts that function as works in another medium rather than as explanations of the paintings. The σ-essays draw on art, theory and scientific language, using formulas, physical concepts and speculative structures as material. They remain open, leaving uncertain whether one is encountering an artwork, a conceptual construction or a theoretical form.

Stephan Konings

More information

Interview by Walter van Teeffelen:
marbellamarbella.es – World Fine Art Professionals and Their Key Pieces
Dutch version: inzaken.eu.

Music project:
Sonic Deaf Squad – (Bandcamp)