Durational Landscapes: Time, Light, and Perception in Contemporary Abstract Painting
Most images resolve quickly.
You see them, understand them, move on.
These don’t.
They take time—not because they are complicated, but because they don’t settle into a single state.
These contemporary abstract paintings unfold gradually, revealing themselves through light, surface, and duration.
What Is a Durational Landscape?
Not landscape in the literal sense.
No horizon necessary—the horizon keeps expanding. No fixed point. No stable orientation. Because we are in it, we are the landscape, and it is within us.
This is a field of relationship. Built up, worked through, adjusted over time.
Something you move through visually, rather than take in all at once.
Time in the Surface
Time isn’t something added afterwards. It’s imbued.
Layering, oxidation, reworking—each stage remains present in the surface.
Riding the Waves of Time and Light
108 x 72 inches
Limestone, marble, mica, oxidized metals, and mineral pigments on canvas. The surface is materially dense—holding something beyond image. It remains in flux, transitioning. Parts come forward, others fall back, depending on when you’re looking.
Nothing fully resolves. It stays in motion.
Light Changes the Work
Light doesn’t just reveal what’s there.
It interferes with it.
Absorbed in some areas, caught in others, released unevenly across the surface.
Twilight in the Garden
36 x 36 inches
Shifts quietly—transforming day into night, flowers into butterflies. Colour doesn’t hold still. It moves subtly, but enough to continually change how the work is seen.
Surface Holds Its Own Activity
The surface isn’t passive. It is where everything is happening.
Turquoise, phosphorescence, mica, marble, oxidized elements—none of it sits cleanly. Each material carries its own behaviour, layer over layer compressing time and energy into a shifting field of blue, light, and memory.
Infinite Energy
54 x 72 inches
Limestone, marble, graphite, and ultramarine hold tension without release. Nothing overt, but not neutral either. Energy is contained within the structure of the surface.
Seeing Takes Time
You don’t get it all at once.
Something registers. Then something else.
Relationships shift—tone, depth, reflection, light.
https://seftelgallery.com/original-art/majestic-hills/
Majestic Hills
72 x 48 inches
Moves between structure and atmosphere. It doesn’t decide for you. It continues to open depending on how long you stay with it.
Final
These works don’t present a fixed image.
They don’t finish.
They shift—through light, through time, through how long you stay with them.
People often ask how long this otherworldly light lasts. I usually say, longer than most attention spans.
But in truth, the works continue beyond that—moving with you into the night. Wavelengths shift. New ways of seeing emerge.
That’s where they hold.