FRAGMENTS OF A VITA CONTEMPLATIVA
Fragments of a Vita Contemplativa unfolds against a backdrop of speed, productivity and constant stimuli, exploring the value of slowness, attentiveness and Being. Inspired by The Big Blue (1988) and Byung-Chul Han’s Vita Contemplativa (2023), the theme turns toward fragments of a contemplative life: moments in which environment, perception, concentration and material gather into a tactile, unhurried visual language.
It is a search for where such moments still breathe today. By noticing them and shaping them into visual work, we begin to ask whether they are truly as passive as they seem. They may appear insignificant, yet they carry the traces of something other: an origin not driven by purpose, in which nonetheless something becomes visible.
The final chapter of Vita Contemplativa is titled The Coming Society. The phrase evokes a vision of the future, a pointing ahead, as if contemplation does not only look back or withdraw, but also gestures forward, announcing. It suggests a society not yet here, but arising as possibility, as fore-feeling.
This ‘coming society’ resonates with Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on a community founded not on utility or identity, but on openness, on simply being, without name or aim. And with Walter Benjamin, who wrote of the days to come not as progress, but as rupture, as spark, as the possibility of transformation.
Within the work, contemplation, resonance and slowness are central. They point toward an alternative to the dominant rhythm of efficiency and control. Perhaps this other society is not yet visible. Yet it may be growing quietly, somewhere at the margins, in moments we now dismiss as absence. Like sketching idly on a table, or reshaping an image on your phone. Small gestures that open space for something not yet named. Who can tell what worlds may be born from contemplation.
THE INTERNET HAS NO EDGES
Smartphone Doodles is, in essence, a painting: acrylic and pencil, built up layer by layer on a wooden frame. Yet the image has its origin elsewhere: it began as one of the digital doodles, drawn on a smartphone. Digital traces usually vanish into the endless stream of swipes and scrolls, but here one such gesture is slowed down, condensed, and anchored in matter.
The work touches upon the logic of the digital world, but without submitting to its speed or reproducibility. This is not printmaking or reproduction; it is a unique object, constructed by hand. The doodle is not printed but literally reshaped in paint and pencil. In this way, the fleeting gesture acquires weight and presence.
This translation from digital to analogue is more than a technical choice. It is an inquiry into what remains when one tries to hold on to the temporary. At a time when everything rushes past, this work becomes an exercise in slowness, attention, and surrender.
It is not an illustration of an idea, but a field in which something can take place: an encounter, a shift, perhaps even a moment of synchronicity—an unexpected convergence of details that suddenly takes on meaning and sets the work in a new direction.
It breathes the physical presence of matter and handwriting, yet carries within it the echo of a digital movement.
STUDIO WORKBENCH TRIPTYCH
STUDIO WORKBENCH TRIPTYCH consists of three large works that emerge from the very surface of the studio itself. The three ‘tables’ on which the work is based long functioned as carriers of sketches, notes, paint residues and fragments of processes. Instead of painting a traditional canvas, the tabletop itself was used as source.
By covering the tables with a silver layer of acrylic paint and then peeling it away like a skin, a snapshot of the working process was captured as an inverted imprint, a memory layer of gestures that would otherwise have been lost. Smudges, residues, streaks and rough lines together form an indirect composition, not conceived but surfaced. The result is a kind of negative of labour, in which traces are not represented but embodied.
The work raises questions about the status of the provisional, the accidental and the residual. What happens when the process itself, what usually remains outside the image, is made into the image? Studio Workbench Triptych is an extraction of presence, a tangible moment of thinking in the making.
OCEANIC FEELING
The term Oceanic Feeling was introduced by the writer Romain Rolland and later described by Sigmund Freud: a sense of boundless connectedness with the world, as if dissolving into something far greater than one’s own existence. It is a sensation in which we experience both motion and smallness, absorbed into everything that flows around us.
From this perspective, the act of working begins with a conscious pause. We do not impose our will, but allow the material to speak back: paint that seeps, pigment that adheres unexpectedly, structures that take shape beyond our control. In this interplay something becomes visible that is not dictated by us.
Within this theme there is an attitude of reverence. We give nature the space to show its own potential and, in doing so, make our own smallness tangible. The work becomes a place where nature and human care for one another, from which a new sensibility may emerge, a space that reminds us of the forces that carry us and of the fact that we are only a part of them.
ON THE EMANCIPATION OF MATERIALS
In the series ON THE EMANCIPATION OF MATERIALS (2022), a minimalist style is developed with an interest in improvisation and a contemporary sensibility. Its foundation lies in the characteristic use of materials, the backgrounds against which the forms and lines are set, and the self-made metal frames. Equally important is the minimalist approach, marked by openness and a relatively large amount of negative space, which creates the stillness from which the works can convey emotion.
The works employ different materials such as paint, pencil, steel, chalk and paper. What is essential here is that each element was made at an earlier moment, outside the canvas. The elements were applied as a thin layer onto other surfaces, coming into contact with other materials before being transferred in their dried form onto the canvas. During the process, paint was mixed in varying proportions with water or acrylic medium to make it thinner or thicker. The differing consistencies allowed colours to flow and merge in unpredictable ways. While control was lost, natural laws were allowed to take their course.
The reflective background creates unity between the canvas and the often transparent elements. In the making process, the choice was to assume an anonymous role as makers. It is not about the intentional act, but rather the opposite: creating a work freed from the human hand, allowing space for a much freer and more natural outcome. The idea is to let go of the dominant, manipulative stance that the use of brushes tends to reinforce, so that the material itself can be used more diversely and take on a greater, more autonomous role in the creative process. From this perspective, the aim is to appeal directly to the sensory experience and arrive at an outcome that appears more mystical, more manifold, and not immediately within our grasp.
I WOULD DO ANYTHING FOR YOU
IN THE BOAT SHED INSTALLATION
NEW NATURE
“We moeten leren onszelf opnieuw te wekken en wakker te houden, niet met mechanische hulpmiddelen, maar door een oneindige verwachting van de dageraad, die ons zelfs in onze diepste slaap niet verlaat. Ik ken geen bemoedigender feit dan het onbetwijfelbare vermogen van de mens om zijn leven te verheffen door een bewuste inspanning… om met opzet te leven.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1845
In the thought of Thoreau something resonates that finds reflection in the theme New Nature: the ongoing exploration of the boundary between life and art. This inquiry takes shape by bringing together diverse contexts such as daily life, work, walking, or contemplation. At the heart of the work lies personal involvement and the creation of a reality bound to the tangible and the earthly. From this stance grows the desire to live in the moment.
Within contemporary art, the conceptual field of New Nature is marked by a shifting perspective on nature and culture. Artists operate in a landscape where the classical division between the natural and the artificial begins to dissolve. The field is nourished by theories of the Anthropocene, new materialism and posthumanism, and it investigates how technology, ecology and human activity are interwoven. In this framework, practices emerge that use hybrid materials, construct artificial ecosystems, or make visible the processes through which nature and culture continually take on each other’s form. It is not a fixed movement, but a dynamic landscape that invites artists to think both critically and poetically about their relation to the world around them.
What converges within this theme are vast and at times abstract terrains. The personal position within them is that of one who searches, feels, and moves along. The work does not proceed from a closed theory, but from a bodily engagement with material and context. The inquiry unfolds through the act of doing, in gathering elements from daily life, work, and study. Out of this emerges a practice in which the larger questions of New Nature are translated into forms: a field in which awareness and imagination provide orientation.
THE STONE CYCLE: A PROCESS IN WHICH ROCKS ARE FORMED, BROKEN DOWN AND REFORMED
MATERIALS
Libethenite, Hiddenite, Dragonite, Aragonite, Cockscomb, Albite, Fluorite, Ramsdellite, Ruby and Kyanite, Dolomite, Desert Rose, Sand Stromatolite, Natrolite, Actinolite in Talc, Carminite on Scorodite, Diopsite, Glaucophane, Bauxite, Sodalite, Crocoite, Adamite, Albite, Sphalerite, Peacock Ore, Aventurine yellow, Clinochlore (Seraphinite), Lizardite, Hematite, Galena, Sphalerite & Quartz, Alurgite Mica & Hydrotalcite,Fuchsite Mica, Natrolite on matrix,Tourmaline, Orthoclase, Muscovite,Wolframite, Coxcombe, Baryte, Aquamarine, Zeiringite (rare variation Aragonite + plaster
THE ROCK CYCLE: A PROCESS IN WHICH ROCKS ARE FORMED, BROKEN DOWN AND REFORMED
A plinth presents a large ‘semi-precious stone’ weighing 27.5 kilos. Under a spotlight the stone glimmers as you approach. The dozens of minerals embedded within it once lay in small cardboard boxes, displayed on a market stall.
For this work the stones were purchased, broken apart with hammer and chisel, and re-formed into one single stone. It was an attempt at releasing them from their assigned use-value and returning them to their original state of being.
By imitating the Rock Cycle, I thought I might fuse the stones in a way that approaches nature. Faced with the beauty of the stones and the geological structures that were lost in the process, chiselling felt brutal. Yet at the same time it approached something of the recycling processes of nature itself, where stones are shaped and broken down by time and pressure. Moreover, I was continuing a process already set in motion by their extraction. Doing it myself, without machinery, became something meditative: a rhythmic, slow act.
The crushed fragments were brought together in a mould, cast in the form of an existing stone. To those who look closely, faint glimmers of the original stones remain visible. And to those who keep looking, even the contours of a shoreline, somewhere near Dover, may be discerned.
Yet the chisel also reveals a tension between natural cycles of formation and decay, and human attempts at re-ordering. However deliberate they may seem, such attempts are often arbitrary and temporary.
Gradually the process exposes the precarious position of the maker. Every attempt at release is also an intervention. Every gesture bears traces of hierarchy, of attribution, of subjugation.
The mould gives the stone an apparently natural form, but it is a form entirely predetermined. It makes the work reproducible, repeatable, and thereby supports precisely the same system from which the material was once extracted.
These are systemic structures the work seeks to break free from, yet simultaneously relies upon. The entire act, as well as its outcome, remains within a framework that still belongs to the same system.
The stone stands on its plinth as a singular attempt to relate differently to material. What began as an effort to release it from its role within commercial frameworks of meaning revealed itself above all as a reframing. Not a liberation, but a shift.
Is not the white cube itself simply a vitrine through which one walks?
With these conclusions chiselled out rather than thought out, one stands where others have stood before: at the threshold of a mode of thinking that has long existed, yet is seldom lived.
Namely the question of whether another form of sustainability can be imagined.
Not an ethic of optimisation, but an ethic of restraint.
Not management, but care.
Not measurability, but sensory attunement.
Not sustainability as management, but sustainability as relation. Slow, imperfect, relational.
Not a solution, but another way of being present.
Some of the directions that begin to take shape here:
Ecological Ethics
A way of thinking in which the human is not central, but understood as part of a larger ecological network. Not the question of what we do to the world, but how we might resituate ourselves within it.
Practices of Care
A relational approach to materiality and environment based on attention, maintenance and attunement. Not production or efficiency, but an ethic of care and responsibility over time.
Ecopoetics
A practice of language and perception in which the non-human is allowed to speak. Art as a space to learn again how to look, listen, feel—beyond the productive gaze.
Affective Sustainability
Sustainability not as plan or policy, but as affective relation: mourning for loss, attachment to material, confusion about responsibility. Emotion as a form of ethics.
Ethics of Slowness
An invitation to slow down, pause, do less. Not a technological solution, but a disposition. Not the urge to create more, but perhaps even to stop, or to wait.