Stephan Konings is a Dutch visual artist living and working in Amsterdam. His paintings are built on aluminium panels using layered metallic pigments, interference mica, and orb-like forms, sealed under a final epoxy layer. The surface refracts light so that colour, depth and form shift as you move; what you see depends on angle, light and attention, and no two encounters are the same.

He has aphantasia. Inner pictures are simply not available to him. This is not a handicap he works around; it is the condition from which the work emerges. Without imagery, what remains is the pull between forces: weight, rhythm, tension, elements that have not yet found their balance. A single panel can go through months of addition, removal and resealing before something holds. The composition arrives through that negotiation and in the moment.

For Konings, beauty is the suspicion of a hidden system: the point where something feels coherent without revealing why. Once the organising principle is fully known, the enchantment breaks. His paintings stay deliberately before that point.

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 until something settles that I cannot fully explain, and then I stop. What you bring to the work is as much a part of it as what I left there. I seal the surface in the studio. The work completes itself in looking.

Stephan Konings

Working principle: apophenic (the viewer infers patterns).
Stance toward depiction: apophatic (no explicit representation).

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)

Artikel op Inzaken (Dutch)
inzaken.eu – Schoonheid is het vermoeden van een verborgen systeem