The sheet of copper I left on the workbench overnight has already started to darken at the edges. I hadn’t done anything to it yet, just cut it to size and walked away, and already the reaction was underway. Every mark I make will fade. The metal is oxidizing as I shape it, but somewhere along the way that oxidation stopped being the problem and became the work’s language. For a long time I treated entropy as the enemy.

Last November at Art Rotterdam, a gallerist I’d been in contact with for months walked past my corrosion pieces without stopping. I watched her pause at the booth across the aisle, large-format photographs of rusted industrial surfaces, beautiful work, surfaces that could have been cousins of mine. She stayed there for twenty minutes. She never came back. I stood behind my table for the rest of the afternoon, smiling at people who glanced and moved on, and felt the plain humiliation of being unnecessary.

I am working with oxidation when the system breaks down. For weeks I’ve been developing a patination formula: specific ratios of copper sulfate to ferric chloride, controlled application temperatures, documented exposure times. The systematic approach promises predictable surface transformations: measure precisely, record every variable, create the reproducible rust patterns that will work across all future pieces. But the metal keeps producing textures I didn’t program. The mixture that should yield uniform green oxidation instead throws up jagged copper-sulfate crystals, pale blue-white, sharp enough to catch on a fingernail.

There is a problem I have been circling for twenty years, and I am no closer to solving it than when I started. I suspect no one is. I suspect the problem is built so that no one can be. Consciousness. The fact that there is something it is like to be you. Not the mechanics of perception (we’ve mapped those tolerably well). Not the neural correlates; fire this cluster of neurons and the subject reports seeing blue.

A piece of steel has been sitting in a bath of ferric chloride for three days. When I pull it out, the surface has turned into something I wasn’t expecting. A landscape, almost. Ridges and valleys, dark deposits along fault lines, and in one corner something like steam caught mid-drift. I’m holding the panel at arm’s length, acid stinging the cuts on my fingers, and something happens. I see a battlefield at dawn.

Last October I ruined forty panels in a single afternoon. Not by accident. I had been working with a batch of cold-rolled steel, preparing pieces for a commission, running my usual ferric chloride protocol. Controlled. Documented. The kind of process that yields predictable copper-brown surfaces with a satisfying patina, the surfaces people actually want to buy. Forty panels, identical treatment, identical steel. I could have done it in my sleep.

I’m standing in front of a Rothko at the Stedelijk when something shifts. Not in the painting - in me. The orange and red panels haven’t moved, but suddenly they’re there in a way they weren’t a moment ago. Something about the relationship between those two fields of color, the way they simultaneously separate and merge, creates a recognition I can’t quite articulate. A tourist next to me takes a photo and moves on.

Jeroen Veen — Voice Profile Extracted from the Obsidian vault (C:\local_dev\ideas) in April 2026. For use as reference when writing or refining essays. Three Registers 1. Melancholic-lyrical (strongest, most distinctive) Soft, rhythmic sentences with long subordinate clauses. Fragrant, sensory. Dutch is the native language of this register. Examples: “Langs de weemoedige pracht van verlaten industriele complexen bewegen langzaam de seizoenen en doen de stalen constructies in verstilde afzondering verteren. Schoonheid die zacht nagloeit wanneer ze aan het vergaan is.