Some paintings don’t move until they feel a specific kind of gravity. For this one, that pull was MOON—a group exhibition at Trent Gallery in Waterkloof, Pretoria.
The theme resonates with the dark, sensitive, and quietly astute energy of its curator, Helen Lötter. Helen has a way of working that is gentle but intensely perceptive; when she invited me to include a work in this show, it gave the painting the right conditions to finally leave the studio. Not as a rush-job “for a deadline”, but as something that had been orbiting for years and was ready to land.
’Tis all snakes and ladders, isn’t it?
Oil on canvas · 96 × 96 cm
I’ve been working on this painting on-and-off for many years. It’s been a slow companion, changing shape as I have—accumulating layers of thought and technology that now sit as faint archaeology beneath the final surface.
What’s funny is its origin. It didn’t start as a moon, or a skull, or a psychological diagram. It began as a literal drill chuck key: a utilitarian tool designed for tightening and gripping. Over time that diagram drifted. The tool dissolved into the faint orthographic scaffolding of a tesseract (hypercube) that now structures the mist. Same impulse, different register: the human need for structure, alongside a growing distrust of any structure pretending to be final.
Along the way, the work collected ghosts. There were phases haunted by mushroom clouds—that background humidity of modern anxiety—and by the early visual mood of machine learning applied to images. I used deep style transfer experiments as reference material, letting that “already processed” computational atmosphere leak into the painting’s weather.
There’s literal archaeology here too: light UV-cured surface printing with a Canon Arizona. It wasn’t a gimmick so much as an admission that contemporary painting shares its room with printers, cameras, compressed files, and computational vision. I don’t see it as contamination; it’s simply part of the material reality of how we see now.
The penultimate gesture was turning the Infanta into Alice—letting Velázquez’s courtly child loosen into Carroll’s rule-breaking wanderer. The final gesture was much quieter: allowing the bottom-right sitter to remain as a half-formed observer. Someone left at the edge of the field to witness the painting in my future absence.
A final varnish pass unified the nocturnal values and pulled the whole thing into one atmosphere—less “sections”, more continuous weather.
Exhibition details: MOON at Trent Gallery
I’m grateful to Helen for the prompt that finally resolved this piece. You’re warmly invited to the opening to see it in person alongside a group of exceptional artists.
- Opening: Thursday, 23 January · 18:00
- Dates: 23 January – 19 February 2026
- Venue: Trent Gallery, Waterkloof, Pretoria
- Curated by: Helen Lötter
If you’re in Pretoria (or feel like a small pilgrimage), please come through. I’d love to see you there.
Inquire regarding this work · Artist Statement
