The Work in the Field
I start without an image. I begin with action: adding, removing, shifting, sealing. I stop when something settles that I cannot fully explain. That moment is closer to recognition than to understanding.
As you move, the relations within these paintings are read differently. The interference pigments, gathered in orbs, shift with light and position: reds move toward blue, blues toward violet. Edges recede and return. Alignments form, hold for a moment, then loosen again. What changes is not the image itself, but the way colour, depth and tension hold together in perception.
Structure and Apophenia
I work with apophenia, the tendency to find pattern in ambiguous material. The central forms 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 perception to begin searching. Faces, landscapes and diagrams may appear, but they are not painted as subjects. They are readings that arise in the encounter.
Titles come afterwards. They are my own reading of a work that already exists as a structure of relations. They offer an entry point, not a key. If your reading diverges from mine, the painting remains open to it.
The orbs as anchors
The orbs anchor the field. Their size, spacing, colour and position create a relational rhythm. Each one adjusts the others, and small shifts in placement change the whole. Together they guide how the eye moves, drawing attention along certain paths and holding it there. What feels like an implied order in the painting is this network of relations. The system is in the surface.
Beauty as suspicion of a system
Beauty appears when scattered elements begin to cohere, when rhythm holds and colour and form agree without fully explaining why. I have learned not to resolve that moment too far. The paintings stay close to that threshold, where meaning gathers but does not close.
Surface, depth and attention
The epoxy layer gives a flat panel a shallow spatial depth. From one angle the work can appear dense and dark; from another, almost weightless. That shifting depth changes the way you look. Attention slows down. The eye tests alignments, revises what it thinks it sees, and follows small glimmers of sense across the surface.
Your role in the work
These paintings bring the making of meaning into view. They show how quickly perception begins to connect fragments, fill gaps and form provisional readings. What feels charged in the work comes partly from the painting and partly from the way you relate to form, rhythm and tension. Each reading becomes part of the structure of the encounter.
When you stand in front of one of these paintings, the process that shaped it continues in you.
Looking completes the work.
Stephan Konings
More about the work:
The Suspicion of a Hidden System, a structural reading
Truth appears clothed, naked before Beauty, the gate where Openness keeps watch. A short essay on Art
A Ray, A story on light, appearance, and hidden source.
A story of Everything and No‑thing , a speculative science narrative
Vita ex nihilo , a speculative science narrative