— Summer Came Eventually
2026 - ongoing
Installation view at Prospects 2026. From left to right: The Bather no. 03, Summer Came Eventually, Intensive Care (Pietà), 2026. Photo: Tommy Smits
Note: This project is still ongoing and therefore incomplete. I will be updating this page regularly with new works and updated texts.
Working from family and holiday photographs, I return to fragments of the past in search of something that can no longer be fully recovered. Rather than treating photographs as factual records, I approach them as unstable constructions, shaped by memory, imagination, and the passage of time. This body of work is an attempt to revisit my childhood and make sense of a rupture within my family.
The Palette (Window Seat), 2026 - UV print on plywood, oil paint, 40 x 53 cm
Using artificial intelligence, I ask a system to describe archival photographs, rewrite these descriptions, and feed them back into the model. With each iteration, the images drift further from their source. Faces become indistinct, gestures lose their certainty, and familiar scenes begin to dissolve. What emerges are images that feel emotionally true, yet remain detached from the reality they once depicted. In this way, the process mirrors memory itself: every act of remembering is also an act of reconstruction.
The Palette (Tulips I), 2025 - UV print on plywood, oil paint
At its core, the work is concerned with the ways emotional experiences are inherited, concealed, and passed between generations. Revisiting these photographs becomes a way of confronting what was visible and what remained unspoken within my family. It is an attempt to understand how certain histories continue to shape us long after the events themselves have passed.
Rendering of a Celebration I, 2026 - Jaqcuard woven tapestry, 182 x 140 cm
The project also continues an ongoing exploration of masculinity that has run throughout my practice. Growing up, many of the men around me embodied ideals of strength, resilience, and self-sufficiency, while vulnerability, grief, and emotional openness often remained difficult to express. The work asks how these expectations shape our relationships with ourselves and others. Why do we struggle to communicate care? What does it mean to be strong? How do inherited ideas of masculinity influence the ways we experience intimacy, responsibility, and loss?
The Palette (Glow in The Dark), 2026 - UV print on plywood, oil paint, 40 x 30 cm
These questions are inseparable from the family dynamics explored throughout the work. Looking back at these images is also a way of redefining my own position within the family structure: as a son trying to understand his mother, as a brother, as a partner, and as someone navigating the emotional legacies that have shaped him. Through this process, personal history becomes a lens through which broader questions of identity, care, and belonging can be examined.
Portrait of a Man, 2026 - Jacquard Woven Tapestry, 137 x 106 cm
The images are translated into tapestries, UV-printed plywood works, and installations incorporating domestic furniture and decorative objects. These materials function as carriers of memory, embedding the work within a physical environment that echoes the spaces in which these experiences unfolded. Together, the works occupy a space between presence and absence, where memory, fiction, and lived experience continuously overlap.
The Palette (Boyhood), 2026 - UV print on plywood, oil paint, 60 x 40 cm