From a field of cracked, richly textured matter in grey-blue, a core of colour lights up: a grid of red, yellow, blue and green lines, like a galaxy seen from very far away.

Lode Laperre (Kortrijk, 1966) literally builds his paintings up from many layers of acrylic paint and then works them over again with incisions, forced craquelure and other interventions. Through this deconstruction he makes the hidden legible once more: the painting unfolds from its core. What reads as an abstract image from a distance becomes, up close, a relief that can be read like a text; the art critic Willem Elias spoke of a palimpsest.

In the new Astral Realm series (2026) this layering takes on a cosmic register. The cosmic and the earthly, the whole and the detail, Eastern and Western pictorial elements come together in it – the fusion that Laperre himself describes as the heart of his visual language.