The Zone

2026

oil on 4 hinged wood panels

26x38 inches (closed) / 26x72 inches (open)

The Zone is a hinged polyptych that functions simultaneously as painting, object, and architectural fragment. With four panels painted on both sides, it rejects a fixed orientation -front and back, flat or cubic-. Meaning shifts depending on how the work is opened, closed, and encountered; what is revealed in one configuration becomes concealed in another. 

When closed, the exterior appears monolithic, heavy, dense, and quarry-like; It evokes the labor of the creative process: a space of extraction, resistance, instruments, matter, and accumulated knowledge. Opened, it reveals a pale, unstable interior hovering between studio, set, and psychological chamber —a place of projection and manifestation, where forms emerge, dissolve, and remain unresolved. On the reverse, a sentence embedded in marble functions as an incantation or encoded instruction.

The work draws on folding, spatial reversal, reflection, as if two spaces were exchanging and transmitting. Mirrors, reversed words, recesses and protruding forms acting as dispensers and receivers.

Referencing the atmosphere of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, The Zone becomes a site of creation, uncertainty, and risk; something felt, navigated, and entered. Operating like a contemporary, non-religious altarpiece, it modulates energy rather than narrative, moving between concealment and revelation, material labor and invisible forces.