These paintings by Svenja Deininger follow a path of perceptual complexity. Hovering midway between figurative and abstract, the Austrian artist's works interweave various elements of a visual thought process built around recollected objects and sudden formal insights. The colours swim up through layer after layer of paint, among geometric segments and more gently abstract modular planes that flow together to create a final surface full of unexpected positive and negative spaces, an interplay of thicknesses and volumes.

Norton museum of art, palm beach, USA

It is we, the living, who walk in a world of phantoms, said the 19th century French poet Gérard De Nerval. De Nerval’s life existed somewhere between a lucid dream and madness. Somewhere in-between this polarity was an ineffable space where he felt the miracle of poetry existed. For De Nerval, written verses were not a hymn to beauty, nor its description or mirror, but beauty itself, with all of its imagined colors, fragrances, and forms¹.