VANTA - Veil XVIII - NO RESERVE

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.

Veil extends a preoccupation that runs through my earlier gradient and light series — First Light, Aura, Lumen, Flare — where color and radiance are the subject; here, that same soft luminosity is turned toward the figure, and the face becomes another kind of light source.

Each painting begins with a photograph. The image is worked 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. This reduced image becomes the working blueprint. It is projected onto the canvas, the fields carefully outlined, and each area then filled by hand with acrylic on cotton — extremely thin, retarder fluids are added to delay the drying process, layered passes that build the tones gradually. Once the flat fields are in place, the surface is worked over: brushed, softened, and blurred through many patient, near-transparent layers, with additional passes laid down by airbrush where the transitions need to become truly weightless.
The blur is not applied as an effect but painted into being, every soft edge the result of slow reworking, of pulling forms just barely into and out of focus. A protective varnish finishes each work, deepening the surface and letting the figure recede a little further into it.
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.