Stephan Konings is a Dutch visual artist whose paintings investigate the threshold between perception and interpretation. Working from his studio in Amsterdam, he has developed a distinctive practice that positions the viewer as co-producer of meaning.
His compositions emerge from a finely tuned interplay of material, form, and chromatic rhythm. Rather than illustrating an idea, each work begins as an open field, an amorphous structure built through layered metallic pigments on aluminum panels. These surfaces evolve into complex, geological textures that suggest hidden organizational logics without ever rendering them explicit.
Over this base, Konings introduces colored orbs made from interference mica pigments that shift chromatically with light and movement. This temporal dynamism ensures that no viewing experience is identical, reinforcing his vision of perception as an active and unstable process.
A key concept in Konings’s work is apophenia: the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in ambiguous stimuli. Rather than treating this as cognitive error, he embraces it as aesthetic strategy. His paintings set conditions for viewers to become aware of their own pattern-seeking impulses, transforming apophenia from symptom into method.
“Beauty is the suspicion of a hidden system,” Konings observes. “When something appears coherent but its organizing principle remains elusive, we enter a state of heightened attention.” This tension between perceived order and unresolved structure drives both his creative process and the experience it generates.
Konings works without predetermined outcomes, or mental imagery. His method is not led by internal visualizations, but by direct negotiation with materials and structures as they emerge. This intuitive yet precise process yields works that feel discovered rather than constructed. A final epoxy resin layer seals the piece while intensifying color and introducing a perceptual threshold, a reflective membrane between viewer and image.
A graduate of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (1999), Konings has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions. His paintings are represented by www.gallery238.com and held in private collections in the Netherlands and abroad.
Artist statement
The following text by Stephan Konings offers a personal reflection on his artistic process, shaped by his experience with aphantasia:
As someone with aphantasia, I experience art not as representation, but as immediate presence: a field of tensions, relationships and implicit movement. Not what a work represents, but how it functions determines my experience. Through the absence of inner images, I see directly the visual grammar that structures a work, the carrier beneath the visible.
My work is not an illustration of an idea, but a form of thinking without representation. Each painting is a concentrated action in which material, rhythm and proportion temporarily converge. The surprise that occurs is not coincidental, but a form of congruent revelation. This makes the work both magical and inescapable for me: it possesses truth without narrative. It is mine, without my having “made” or conceived it.
The art practice is a form of research. Where Deleuze philosophically demands imageless thinking, I embody it as a natural consequence of my aphantasia. Where he thinks without image, my art makes tangible what it means to be without image, but with formative consciousness. My work is less discursive, but precisely concrete and formative. It is as if my practice actually materializes the apophatic implications of Deleuze’s theory.
My first paintings, even before the academy, consisted of white square canvases with exclusively horizontal and vertical lines: Mondrian without color. I still use that underlying thought system in my recent epoxy paintings, orbs appear as chromatic interventions in an abstract field. They mark points of tension and relationships, not symbols.
My work emerges from a radial, non-visual consciousness structure in which figuration, ordering and meaning are not planned, but appear. Absence of inner images does not lead to emptiness, but to a direct receptivity for structural tensions, forms and relationships. Each painting is a discovery, not an execution; an encounter, not a projection. In the mirror field that emerges, my own being appears, unintended, but inevitable.
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