A New Disorder

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. Not bad. Not rejected. Just one more thing in a building full of things.

That evening I sat in the hotel bar with my friend Thomas, a painter who’d shown in the same fair three years running. He was on his fourth beer. “The problem isn’t that they don’t like your work,” he said. “The problem is there’s so much work they can’t even see yours.”

I carry this back to the studio. Not the romantic doubt, not Rilke’s “must I write?” Something flatter. More corrosive. In a world drowning in human output, am I creating signal or just adding noise?

Do I matter as a maker?

The doubt arrives in concrete moments. Scrolling through Instagram and counting the artists working with oxidation, patination, rust. Dozens of accounts doing investigations that overlap with mine. Walking through museum storage facilities where thousands of works will never be displayed again. Running my algorithm and watching it generate four hundred compositions in an afternoon, each one exploring color relationships I might have spent a week developing by hand. The machine doesn’t struggle. It doesn’t need to justify itself. It just produces.

When I started, a kilo of copper sulfate cost me a week’s grocery money, and showing work meant persuading one of three galleries in the city to give me wall space. Now I order chemicals by the case, the algorithm generates more variations than I can review, and Instagram will display anything I upload. The democratization I once celebrated has produced something I didn’t expect: a crisis of justification.

I feel it physically. Some mornings I walk into the studio and the smell of ferric chloride hits me, that sharp, metallic bite that used to mean possibility, and I just stand there. Sheets of copper and steel leaning against the wall, bottles of acid on the shelf, the laptop open to last night’s algorithmic run still displaying its grid of generated forms. Everything ready. And I can’t start.

The ideas are there. That’s not it.

The piece I spent three months developing, “Residual Field IV” (layers of copper sulfate and salt water built up over weeks, a surface I genuinely believed had never existed before), got eleven likes on Instagram and no exhibition interest. Eleven. I’d counted them.

But Camus did not have Instagram.

The overproduction creates its own entropy. Not the clean entropy of thermodynamic decay, but a messy cultural disorder where significant work disappears into an ocean of similar efforts. Museums store more art than they can display. The internet hosts more images than any consciousness could survey in multiple lifetimes. Creation itself has become disposable, not in the romantic sense of art for art’s sake, but in the sense that it disappears immediately into the flood.

When I voice this doubt, people offer solutions. Build a brand. Network better. Post more consistently. Find your niche.

I am not built to promote myself. To be at openings. To explain the work to strangers. I am built to stand in a studio that smells like acid and wait for something to happen on a sheet of copper.

Thomas told me once that he paints because he’d be worse without it. Not better with it. Worse without it.

The doubt isn’t about whether the work matters to the world. It’s about whether I matter as someone who makes things. The hours. The chemicals on my hands. Whether any of that amounts to a life that was worth the trouble.

I’ve been dressing this up in species-level arguments about diversity and humanity’s fundamental project. Evasion. One person in a rented studio in the Netherlands, heating bill going up, no gallery representation, wondering whether to keep going.

So I try to stay with the small version of the question.

Working with corrosion helps, though not for the reasons I used to think. I used to say the oxidation operates outside the human conversation entirely, independent of artistic intention, indifferent to cultural context. That’s true but it’s not why it helps. It helps because the work demands my hands. The copper sulfate solution has to be mixed at the right concentration. The steel has to be cleaned with vinegar first or the patination won’t take evenly. I have to watch the surface change in real time and decide when to stop the reaction: sometimes with heat, sometimes by sealing, sometimes by washing everything off and accepting what’s there.

In those moments I’m not thinking about whether I matter. I’m thinking about whether this green is going to hold or turn brown overnight. Whether the crystalline structures forming along the edge will survive the fixative. The doubt doesn’t disappear; it just can’t compete with the immediate demands of the material.

Last week I pulled a piece off the drying rack and found something I hadn’t planned. The ferric chloride had reacted with a trace of zinc in the steel, some impurity in the alloy, and produced a line of deep blue-black across the surface, first the dark indigo of dusk settling into a canal, then thinning to a cold vermilion at the edges where the reaction had exhausted itself. It was beautiful. Not the beauty I’d intended. A beauty I couldn’t have achieved on purpose.

I stood there holding it, smelling the residual acid. The piece existed because I’d set up the conditions for it. This steel, this concentration, this exposure time. Without those choices this surface would never have happened. Not because I’m uniquely talented. Because I was the one standing there.

Programming algorithms produces something similar. The system explores formal possibilities according to mathematical relationships rather than cultural trends. Most of what it generates is unremarkable: row after row of thumbnail grids, shapes that feel arbitrarily placed, color relationships that add up to nothing. But occasionally, in the process of scanning through hundreds of variations, I stop. Last month it was a composition where a cluster of dark ellipses crowded the upper left corner and a single thin line of ochre crossed the lower third, barely there, like a horizon at dusk. The density above pressing down on that fragile warmth below. I recognized it before I understood it. The algorithm didn’t know it was making something worth keeping. I didn’t know what I was looking for until I found it. The work happened between us.

These moments don’t resolve the doubt. They interrupt it. And maybe that’s enough.

I’ve tried the grander answers. I’ve told myself that cultural overproduction is actually humanity’s fundamental project, our biological mission scaled up through consciousness. That every creative act expands the universe’s repertoire of possibilities. That diversity itself is the point. And one evening last winter, walking home along the Maas in that particular dusk light that turns everything provisional, I felt the philosophy collapse. All the elegant thinking about creating for nothing and expanding diversity and transjective beauty. It felt like elaborate rationalization for not being successful. A suit I’d sewn myself, in the dark, to cover something I didn’t want to look at.

What I know is smaller and less elegant. I know that when I don’t work, I feel worse. I know that the studio smells like possibility even on the days I can’t start. I know that Thomas still paints. I know that the gallerist who walked past my booth isn’t the final word on whether the work matters. I know that “Residual Field IV” with its eleven likes contains a surface that has never existed before and never will again.

The disorder persists and grows. More artists, more images, more noise. I haven’t found a way to stand above it, and I’ve stopped believing I need to. Tomorrow I’ll go back to the studio. I’ll mix the copper sulfate, clean the steel, start the reaction. Not because I’ve resolved the doubt, but because the alternative, stopping, answers the question in a way I’m not ready to accept.

The work doesn’t save me from the question. It keeps the question open.

I used to be an idealist. I hope to become one again. Not the kind who believes the world will come around, but the kind who walks into the studio at dusk when the shadow smooths all the irregularities flat, and starts a reaction anyway. The copper doesn’t know it’s futile. Neither, for a few hours, do I.