Nerithe — Abstract Siren and the Act of Seeing
Nerithe is one of the mythic sirens I have created as part of my Siren digital art series,
an ongoing exploration of abstraction, perception, and imagined mythologies. While her name originates from ancient sources, the work itself deliberately avoids any fixed or illustrative representation. This abstraction allows me to approach Nerithe not as a figure to be depicted, but as a presence to be constructed through colour, layering, and visual tension.
In this piece, abstraction becomes a method for imagining what does not exist. Rather than describing a form, I work through successive layers — glaze over glaze — allowing densities and subtle shifts to accumulate. Each layer alters the one beneath it, creating a surface where forms seem to emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure. Nothing is stated directly; instead, the image develops through suggestion and restraint.
This process relies heavily on how the eye behaves when confronted with ambiguity. As viewers, we instinctively search for recognizable shapes, faces, or bodies, even when none are clearly present. The eye attempts to complete what is missing. I consciously engage this phenomenon, allowing the work to hover between recognition and uncertainty. In doing so, the image gently misleads the gaze — not to deceive, but to reveal how perception itself operates.
The abstract language of Nerithe is therefore not decorative or symbolic. It is procedural. The composition emerges through repetition, erosion, and accumulation. Colour relationships and spatial tensions carry the weight of the image, while line gradually loses its descriptive role and becomes a carrier of energy and movement.
Presented as a giclée print, Nerithe preserves the depth, tonal transitions, and material sensitivity of the original digital painting. The print format allows the layered surface to remain legible, inviting slow looking and sustained attention. Rather than offering a resolved image, the work maintains a state of suspension, where meaning remains active but unsettled. The work is also presented internationally through Singulart,
where it is available as a giclée print.
Nerithe functions less as a depiction than as an experience. It occupies a space where abstraction invites the viewer to question not only what is seen, but how seeing itself is shaped. In that sense, the work aligns with one of the enduring functions of art: to guide perception just enough to make us aware of its limits.
Returning to the Figure to Test Abstraction
Since the beginning of the Siren series, abstraction has been my primary territory. It is where forms dissolve, where matter slips, where the image stops representing and becomes movement, tension, emergence. Yet at certain moments in the process, I feel the need to return to the figure.
The Academic Studies emerge from this deliberate shift. They do not signal a nostalgic return to figuration, nor a rejection of abstraction. Instead, they situate themselves within a precise historical logic, referencing 19th-century academic studies — a time when the Grand Tour led artists through Italy to test their vision against the body, light, and material presence.
In that context, the study was never an end in itself. It served to discipline the eye, to sharpen perception, to confront the ideal with the real. It is in this spirit that these images appear in my work today. They are moments of tension — temporary pauses where abstraction agrees to be challenged by the figure.
Each academic study is directly derived from an existing abstract work. The colour palette, the composition, and the atmosphere always precede the figure. The body is never the starting point; it emerges slowly, as a condensation of forms already present. The figure does not illustrate abstraction — it is a provisional consequence of it.
These images do not seek to seduce, nor to reconstruct an idealized past. They function as passages. Returning to the body allows me to measure the distance travelled, to sharpen the gaze, before plunging back into abstraction, altered by the crossing.
Rather than contradicting my abstract practice, these studies reveal its necessity. They remind me that abstraction is not a refusal of discipline, but often what follows after it.
