Galerie Licht — Notes After the Opening

The paintings left the studio three weeks ago and I have been living with their absence since. The walls where they hung for months still carry their ghost — a slightly different patina where the light fell past them for so long.

I walked into Galerie Licht at nine in the morning, two days before the opening, to see the installation. My gallerist, Mies van Rooij, had arranged the six canvases in a sequence I hadn’t anticipated. She put Sediment I and Untitled (Red Ground) on opposing walls — works I had always thought of as belonging to different emotional registers — and the conversation between them was startling.

The red asserts itself. The cream and grey of Sediment I absorbs. Together they created a room that felt like a held breath.

The ceramic works were placed on low plinths in the centre of the first room. I had worried that they would be dwarfed by the canvases, but the scale difference turned out to be the point. The vessels are intimate; they ask you to come closer. The paintings ask you to stand back. The room held both requests simultaneously.

The opening was full. I stood near the entrance most of the evening, watching people move through the work. The piece they spent the longest time with was not the largest canvas — it was Form Study: Vessel I, the small celadon piece. Three people crouched down to look at it from below. That felt like success.