Steganography is the art of hiding a message inside another message, so that no one suspects there is anything to read. In this work from 2009, beneath a silver-grey, grooved surface lies a layering of ochre, turquoise, black and red that only reveals itself on close looking.

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.

The kinship with his recent work is strong: the same movement of building up and breaking open also characterises Astral Realm I (2026), which hangs next to this earlier work on the stand.