These paintings come out of a long process of letting go—of subject, of certainty, of resolution. They aren’t built around a concept or image, but around what painting can hold when those things have thinned out. Rooms, fragments of light, thresholds: they surface and recede without anchoring the viewer.
The shift from earlier work was necessary. I had to move away from depiction—not because it was wrong, but because it had become a habit. The brushwork now follows a different logic: it doesn’t explain, it returns. Not memory in the narrative sense, but something more physical—what remains in the body after the image is gone.
The paintings don’t conclude. They defer. They withhold. That’s not a gesture of ambiguity for its own sake—it’s about refusing to close off meaning too soon. Painting, at this point, isn’t about control. It’s about remaining with the possibility of loss.
There’s a kinship here with artists who understood that painting doesn’t need to declare itself to hold weight—Morandi, D’Hollander, De Keyser. Their work taught me that clarity can coexist with disappearance.
If these paintings do anything, they trace that edge. Not of recognition, but of its undoing. Not the world itself, but how it slips.
For those invested in the work’s trajectory, additional materials, including a CV, are available upon request: natvog@gmail.com
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