2003 — 2026 · Painting series
CircUlaR Series
Started in 2003, the CircUlaR Series examines the instability between what is materially present and what is perceptually completed. The paintings never contain a fully closed circle. Instead, fragments, arcs, and partial geometries produce the condition in which the viewer mentally constructs circularity.
The circle appears, but it is not fully there.
The work stages perception as an active event. Vision becomes less a record of reality than a process of inference, projection, recognition, and symbolic completion. The viewer encounters not only painted forms, but the mind's own tendency to organize fragments into signs.
Non-repetitive color structures suggest abundance, frequency, variation, and the irreducible plurality of perception. Within the constraint of circular fragments, color refuses repetition: order and excess coexist, geometry becomes unstable, and abstraction becomes a way of asking how reality is modeled.
The series anticipates questions central to computational culture and artificial intelligence: how patterns are recognized, how data becomes meaning, how labels stand in for reality, and how symbolic systems allow humans and machines to navigate a world that always exceeds its representations.
The capitalization CircUlaR — C, U, R — suggests the relation between seeing, sensing, and being. The viewer completes the work perceptually.
- Dates
- 2003 — 2026 (ongoing)
- Medium
- Acrylic on canvas
- Form
- Painting series — circular fragments, arcs and partial geometries
- Status
- Ongoing series; individual works exhibited and in private collections
- Representative works
- twoInoneInall (2009) · Vertigoals (2008) · Multiversus (2008) · Fanarchtic (2009)
- Credits
- Hannes Bend
The full CircUlaR grid, including the later 2026 works and the Paint on no one group, is browsable in the CircUlaR section of the Art archive. Dates for a small number of early works are still being verified against studio records.