Artist statement

TLDR

“I make art for people curious about the world and their place in it. My work translates cities, senses, and shared human experience into layered visual conversations, so you can slow down, reflect, and recognise how much we all have in common. One viewer put it better than I can: ‘I did not want to comment because it felt too personal.”

Long read

Steit Slings is a Dutch conceptual artist based in Calpe, Spain, working across 2D and 3D mixed media. His practice has one persistent question: what happens in the space between receiving and understanding?

Trained at the Art Academy in Rotterdam, graduating in 1994 with an exhibition titled World Communication, Steit spent the following decades working as a digital IT architect before returning full-time to his practice in 2019. That career was not a detour. The logic of modular systems, information processing, and structured layering runs directly through both bodies of work.

The Virtual Journeys series translates urban routes into photographic collages built from processed image fragments, stripped of documentary realism to recover something closer to felt memory. Tokyo, Istanbul, Lisbon, Berlin, London, and Rome have each been worked through this method. Not as travel records. As graphic novels of urban experience, built from the same material a city leaves in the mind after you have walked it.

The Senses Project maps the gap between passive reception and active knowing. Six word-pairs, HEAR&LISTEN, LOOK&SEE, SMELL&SCENT, TASTE&SAVOUR, TOUCH&FEEL, LEARN&KNOW, separate the input from the activation. The senses are the channels. The brain is the processor. LEARN&KNOW is not a sixth sense but the architecture that makes the other five mean something. The work does not illustrate this. It creates the conditions for it to happen in the viewer.

When one viewer encountered TOUCH&FEEL, they said they did not want to comment because it felt too personal. That is the work functioning as intended.