A Structural Reading
Part of a series exploring apophatic geometry and reflective resonance.
A reading of Phaëthon and the structures beneath appearance.
Against a lustrous black field, an amorphous, molten form undulates across Stephan Konings’s
Phaëthon (2024), its surface catching light through flecks of gold and silver. Orbiting this central
mass, a constellation of colored orbs in emerald, violet, diaphanous blue, orange, silvery grey and black punctuates the composition with rhythmic precision. These elements establish what the artist calls a “suspicion of hidden systems,” inviting viewers into a dialogue between order and chaos that has become the signature of Konings’s mature practice.
The painting operates through what Konings terms “apophenic structure”, the tendency to
perceive meaningful patterns in ambiguous visual data. Rather than offering a fixed narrative,
Phaëthon creates a field of possibilities where viewers project their own associations. The
central form might suggest a cosmic event, geological formation, or organic growth; the floating
orbs could read as planets, cells, or portals. This interpretive fluidity is not incidental but
central to the work’s conceptual framework.
Material Innovation and Perceptual Play
Konings’s technical approach amplifies these conceptual concerns through sophisticated material choices. Working on an aluminum panel, he builds the central form through layered metallic pigments that create complex, geological textures. The colored orbs employ mica-based interference pigments that shift chromatically as viewers move around the work, ensuring that no two encounters with the painting are identical. A final epoxy resin coating creates depth while sealing the composition under a crystalline surface that both protects and transforms the viewing experience.
This material strategy serves the work’s larger investigation of perception and hidden order. As light conditions change throughout the day, Phaëthon reveals different aspects of itself, embodying the artist’s interest in artworks that exist in temporal flux rather than static completion.
Mythic Resonance and Contemporary Urgency
The title references the Greek myth of Phaëthon, the youth who lost control of his father Helios’s sun-chariot, resulting in cosmic catastrophe. Konings abstracts this narrative into pure energy and form, the painting captures not the story’s literal elements but it’s essential dynamics of ambition, loss of control, and transformation. The work’s precarious balance between structure and dissolution mirrors the mythic moment when order teeters into chaos.
In our current moment of environmental and social upheaval, this mythic framework gains contemporary resonance. The Phaëthon story becomes a meditation on hubris and its consequences, relevant to discussions of human impact on planetary systems. Yet Konings avoids didactic messaging, allowing these connections to emerge through formal rather than illustrative means.
Positioning Within Contemporary Practice
Phaëthon situates itself within several significant currents in contemporary painting. Its phenomenological emphasis on viewer experience connects it to artists exploring cognitive science and perception, while its cosmic scope resonates with renewed interest in spiritual and mythic dimensions of abstraction. The work’s sophisticated material palette places it in dialogue with post-minimal approaches that foreground process and temporality.
Most significantly, Konings demonstrates how traditional painting can engage with complex theoretical questions without sacrificing visual impact. Phaëthon succeeds both as immediate sensory experience and sustained intellectual investigation, a synthesis that marks the most compelling contemporary abstract painting.
Critical Assessment
What distinguishes Konings’s practice is his ability to create works that are simultaneously rigorous and open-ended. Phaëthon establishes clear formal relationships while remaining interpretively generous. The painting’s “active emptiness”, its deep black ground, functions not as negative space but as a generative field that heightens every other element. This sophisticated understanding of compositional dynamics, combined with innovative material exploration, positions Konings as a significant voice in contemporary abstraction.
The work succeeds in creating what the artist describes as “Beauty as the suspicion of a hidden system“, that moment when coherence seems present but remains tantalizingly beyond reach. In sustaining this tension, Phaëthon achieves the rare quality of rewarding both immediate encounter and extended contemplation, ensuring its relevance within evolving discourses around perception, meaning, and contemporary painting’s continued vitality.