Butterfly Effect — the work is finished
Butterfly Effect — Completion of the Work
Some paintings seem to know from the beginning what they want to become. Others conceal their intentions for a long time. This one belonged to the second group.
In painting, one small change can shift everything.
A colour appears that was initially meant to be only a minor accent. One gesture changes the direction of the next. A fragment of the surface begins to demand a response somewhere else in the painting. Something that seemed finished suddenly sets another decision in motion.
These are not great revolutions. More often, they are a few centimetres of paint, a change of tone, a tool dragged through a still-soft layer, or a mark left in place that I had not planned.
And yet, from that moment on, the painting is already slightly different.
This is how I understand the Butterfly Effect.
Not as an illustration of the familiar concept, but as an experience of painting itself — a situation in which one small event causes a whole sequence of others. Each subsequent movement grows out of the previous one, but its consequences can never be fully predicted.
At a certain point, I stop carrying out my earlier idea of the painting. I begin to observe what has actually appeared on the canvas.
That is an important difference.
A painting may begin with an intention, but during the process it starts to create its own network of relationships. Colour affects colour, matter affects light, gesture affects the next gesture. Sometimes something needs to be added. Sometimes removed. And sometimes the most difficult decision is to leave a fragment exactly as it came into being.
For me, finishing a painting does not mean reaching a point at which nothing more could be changed.
Something can always be changed.
It is rather the moment when another intervention would no longer develop the painting, but would begin to take away from what has already happened within it.
I completed “Butterfly Effect” on 18 June 2026.
From a certain point onward, all that remained was to let it stay what it had become.
