VANTA - Veil XXVIII - NO RESERVE

!!! PLEASE NOTE – DELAYED SHIPPING !!!

I will be travelling to China for an exhibition, followed by a short holiday, and will be back around 26 November. Your painting will be carefully packed and shipped as soon as I return. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Veil
Veil is a painting series exploring the threshold where a figure begins to dissolve into light — portraits in which the face is softened almost past recognition, the features loosened into a quiet field of tone, while the hair, shoulders, and clothing hold just enough form to suggest a presence. Each work sits somewhere between portrait and atmosphere, as if the sitter were viewed through breath on glass, or held in the moment just before memory sharpens into a clear image.

The series draws on Gerhard Richter's blurred photo-paintings — particularly the softness of Betty and his portrait work — as well as the quiet, spectral figures of Luc Tuymans, the atmospheric portraits of Marlene Dumas, the hazed intimacy of Michaël Borremans, and the diffused, almost photographic softness of Vilhelm Hammershøi's interiors. Something of Bill Viola's slow, luminous video portraits also sits in the background — a shared interest in the human presence caught at the edge of visibility.

The Process:
Each painting begins with a photograph — either a portrait of my own, or a variation generated by working through a series of altered and sometimes AI-rendered versions of a chosen image until the right expression and composition emerge. This source image is then processed digitally, its color range progressively reduced until only a handful of tones remain — a simplified, almost vectorized version of the original, in which the figure is stripped down to a small vocabulary of flat color fields with hard, defined edges. This reduced image becomes the working blueprint. It is projected onto raw canvas with a beamer, and each color field is then carefully painted in by hand. The acrylic paint used in this stage is mixed with retarders and flow mediums that alter its viscosity and significantly slow its drying time, keeping the surface workable for what follows. Once the flat fields are complete, a structure the same size as the painting — with a large sponge fixed to its underside — is lowered onto the wet surface until it makes full contact with the paint. Wood sanding machines mounted to the top of this structure are then switched on, and their vibration is transmitted through the sponge into the painting, softening the hard-edged color fields and dissolving them into one another until the figure settles into its final, atmospheric softness. In some works the sponge is pre-soaked with a specialized liquid that lends the finished surface a deep, built-in gloss; in others, varnish is applied separately once the work has dried. After the structure is lifted, the painting is left to rest for three to four hours until it is fully set.
Veil is a series about the softness of presence — the way a face can slip in and out of clarity, and the quiet space between seeing someone and only sensing that they are there.

Shipping:
The work is delivered without a frame (professional packaging, rolled in a tube). it can easily be restretched by a professional or on your own, this is also cheaper then the otherwise increased cost of shipping when sending paintings stretched

The measurements indicated are those of the painting stretched and mounted on a frame (The actual measurements of the canvas are larger to allow it to be mounted on a frame 2-4 cm thick.


Disclaimer:
Process photos included in the listing show studies and works in progress, as well as close up photos of showing the structure of the canvas.