Virtual Grids
Transformations
Made in 2001
In this series, I explore how the digital building blocks of a virtual environment can be translated into painting.
Every 3D world is made up of points, lines, and polygons — the grid that forms the invisible structure of virtual space. When this structure becomes pictorially visible, it creates a visual language that balances between reality and simulation.
The series shows how our world gradually shifts from the real to the virtual. The narrative unfolds in fragments: a pipe in a lab, experiments with virtual bodies in jars; a game above grids and beneath a flesh tone; in a café, a real person enjoys the company of a grid figure; beach chairs stand physically on a virtual beach; a fresco appears on a wall; suspicion grows in a zoo, virtual characters in cages, the surrounding world fading. Virtual figures do not survive the digital desert — a mattress remains on a virtual floor. Then come experiments in which real and virtual characters are merged. Finally: the arrogance of a virtual character in a memento mori, a party with only virtual guests.
The paintings act as snapshots of a transition — from physical presence to digital abstraction, from matter to grid. They reveal how image and reality merge into one another.
2001 - Raster Christ
In the same year, I repainted an existing statue of Jesus with a grid pattern. The face and hands — which originally expressed the human closeness of the figure — were made rounded, like digital volumes in a virtual space.
The religious icon thus became a precursor to the virtual figure: a body caught within a grid, a savior translated into polygons. Raster Christ marks a transition between painting and digital sculpture, in which the physical world is quite literally overwritten by the language of the virtual.
2013 - Saturnus.exe
In this 3D animation, the posture of Saturn from Goya’s famous painting is reinterpreted and transformed into a virtual god. He appears as a figure constructed from polygons, lines, and points — the digital building blocks of virtual objects and worlds.
A camera circles dizzyingly around the god until it is finally swallowed by him. Ominous sounds intensify the atmosphere of doom and power. Where Goya’s Saturn devours the flesh of his children, this virtual god consumes the gaze of the viewer. The work thus shifts from mythology to digital metaphysics: the deity is no longer material, but composed of data.
2013 - The Meat Market
Grid figures buy and sell human flesh in a marketplace.
The viewer experiences the scene each time through the eyes of a different figure: as soon as a head turns, the perspective shifts. The sound — recorded at the Anderlecht meat market and mixed with liquid noises — changes subtly with every transition.
The result is a grotesque yet playful fantasy. The virtual world has taken the place of the real one: the grid figures trade in human flesh as if they themselves can no longer be distinguished from the livestock.
The Meat Market, like the painting series, is based on the digital building blocks of a 3D world — polygons, grids, and lines — which here are not only made visible but brought to life. From that structure, the animation shows how our living environment increasingly shifts from the real to the virtual, and how the boundary between observer and image gradually dissolves.
2025 - Stretcher Bars and Eyelets
For the paintings still in my possession, the stretcher bars have been removed. Eyelets have been added around the edges of the canvas.