The Circle, Chapter 35 from The Works

"The circle has no beginning."— Zen saying

In 2023 something unexpected happened.

I wasn't searching for a new series.I wasn't trying to reinvent my work.After more than thirty-five years as an artist, I no longer felt the urge to constantly find something new.

Instead, something found me.

It began with a simple white circle.

Not carefully painted.Not geometrically perfect.It appeared almost by accident, created through pressure, movement and chance. A trace rather than an image.

At first I thought of it merely as an interesting form.

But I kept returning to it.

One circle became two.Two became many.Sometimes they floated over one another like moons.Sometimes they dissolved into layers of paint.Sometimes they seemed to disappear completely into the surface.

I did not yet understand why I couldn't leave them behind.

Only much later did I realise that I had been moving towards this image for most of my life.

Looking back, I can now see the path.

The labyrinth of Chartres had been a search for the centre.

The Fourth Dimension questioned the separation between opposites.

The Falling Angels lived between heaven and earth.

The Inner Landscapes dissolved the distinction between inner and outer worlds.

The scrolls introduced silence.

Chinese painting taught me that emptiness is not absence, but presence.

Without knowing it, every project had been preparing me for this single, uncomplicated form.

A circle.

The beauty of the circle lies in its refusal to explain itself.

It can be the moon.

A mirror.

A tea bowl.

A planet.

A window.

An eye.

Or simply paint on canvas.

It accepts every meaning and rejects every fixed interpretation.

The more I painted them, the quieter they became.

The less they wanted to represent.

The more they simply existed.

At first, the paintings remained abstract.

Layers of white moved across black grounds.

Textures appeared and disappeared.

Old traces resurfaced.

Paint became memory.

The surface became archaeology.

Nothing needed to be illustrated.

Everything was already there.

Then something changed.

Without planning it, the circle slowly transformed.

It was no longer an object on the canvas.

It became a space.

Not a circle to look at.

A circle to look through.

Like opening an ancient Chinese moon gate.

Or looking through a window into another landscape.

It invited stories to enter.

Not stories I invented.

Stories that seemed to have been waiting inside the circle all along.

From that moment onward, the work changed direction.

The circle became a world.

And I entered it.