Infinity Mirror IV (after Van Verendael)

2024, Oil on board, 60cm x 72cm

Flemish flower paintings of the Baroque era served multiple purposes: they were a marker of bourgeois status and sophistication, objects of beauty that celebrated the natural world, but also they were memento mori. The flowers depicted were dead, soon to decay and the insects that crept among them were short-lived. And yet they 'live' still. Beauty and death were apparently inextricable in the 17^th -century mind. The 'Infinity Mirror' series embraces both – in a black void, these beautiful forms from the past emerge, overlap and transform, reflecting the centuries of meaning that accrete and fall away with each new perspective. Everything is different every time you look at it – not least the viewer. That's one of the conditions of being.