Jul 10 - Aug 31, 2025 | Genk (BE)
Refraction emerges from the idea of Claude Monet’s Haystacks series — an exploration of how light alters our perception of form, how time reshapes meaning, and how repetition becomes a tool for revelation. In the same spirit, this new body of work centers on the repetition of a single subject: a portrait rendered in oil, seen again and again through changing intensities of vibrant color.
In Monet’s Haystacks, it was never just the haystack — it was dawn, dusk, shadow, shimmer, decay, the passing season, and the artist’s evolving gaze. Similarly, in Refraction, the subject becomes a vessel — not a fixed identity but a surface for transformation. The work asks: how does the same face shift when the world around it shifts? What truths emerge in chromatic excess or restraint?
To refract is to bend — to interrupt the passage of light and scatter it into multiplicity. In this sense, each painting in the series is a moment of distortion and revelation. Color acts as both filter and force, a way of translating mood, cultural saturation, even psychological weather. In a time when identity and perception are fluid, when the image is endlessly reinterpreted through digital filters, cultural lenses, and political atmospheres, this series becomes a mirror of the world’s fractured but persistent desire to see clearly.
In Refraction, the repetition is not redundant — it’s ritual. It’s a call to slow down and notice how difference lives in the details. Just as Monet painted the same stack of hay to illuminate the shifting nature of light and time, these portraits speak to the instability and beauty of contemporary experience. They are not about one truth, but about many coexisting truths — not just what we see, but how we see.
