Lost familiar things

Bastiaan van Stenis

Bastiaan van Stenis paints because it is the most honest way he knows to live. For more than twenty years he has returned to the studio consistently, not because he has to, but because painting is inseparable from his life. It is how he pays attention, makes sense of experience, and responds to the world around him.

This body of work includes paintings and wall-based assemblages that explore colour, movement, space, and atmosphere. While the work often begins with elements of landscape, it is not concerned with depicting specific places. Instead, it attempts to capture what it feels like to be somewhere: the heat of the day, a distant horizon, a passing memory, or a moment that is difficult to put into words.

Certain forms and shapes appear repeatedly throughout the work. They are less symbols than familiar companions—markers that help navigate an ongoing conversation between memory, sensation, and place.

The paintings are physical objects first. Paint, texture, surface, and colour are not used to illustrate an idea or tell a story. They are the language of the work itself. Meaning emerges through looking rather than explanation.

There are traces of South African landscapes throughout the paintings, but also echoes of the artist's generation: public swimming pools, caravan parks, road trips, music, analogue technology, and fragments of visual culture from the 1990s. These influences are present as feelings rather than direct references.

Van Stenis is not interested in providing answers or fixed interpretations. His paintings occupy the space between abstraction and memory, between what is seen and what is felt. They invite the viewer to slow down, pay attention, and find their own way into the work.

Ultimately, these paintings are less about describing the world than about reflecting the experience of living in it.