South African artist Bastiaan Van Stenis’ work addresses subjects such as environmental critique, urban nostalgia, science fiction, and horror, and has been described as influenced by surrealism, expressionism, neo-romanticism, and para-pastoralism. But perhaps the most accurate way of accessing his practice is not through its relation to bigger canons or movements, but instead through acknowledging the artist’s interest in the creation of moods, or, as he describes it, his search for “feelings I try to feel.”

Artists have long reflected on what it might look like to see the Earth from afar, and on the existential questions prompted by space and its vastness. From Chesley Bonestell and Eduardo Paolozzi to Yinka Shonibare and Yayoi Kusama, representations have varied in format and intentionality: creative speculations about technology, immersive installations inspired by life on other planets, post-colonial takes, and many others. Bastiaan Van Stenis brings a whole new absurdity to this exploration.

In Van Stenis’ latest body of work, commonly overlooked materials and unresolved figures gain protagonism as stories are teased to viewers. There is only so much the artist reveals and allows others to see, offering clues in painting titles and leaving the rest up to interpretation. His oil painting Death by moonshine (2025), for instance, depicts the solitude of a Mars-like landscape where a figure wrapped in what appears to be a blanket is lying down. The title plays with the dual meaning of “moonshine” as both homemade liquor and lunar light, and although moonshine liquor can be deadly and moonlight obviously cannot, it is in that meaning-making ambiguity that the artist’s humorous framing succeeds. Similarly, in the mixed-media piece The greatest velvet meatball landing (2025), the ambition and seriousness of imperial space exploration are overshadowed by the materiality mentioned in the artwork’s title. We are not speculating about a high-tech spaceship, nor are we embedded in the Cold War space race, but instead we find ourselves admiring the absurdity of a velvet meatball landing on another planet. There are other scenes too: the outline of a kiss with a backdrop of a piano, gatherings of animals and ghostly figures, and a group of interstellar travellers’ farewell. One of the works, however, is set in a landscape that is less evidently galactic: of a half lady-like, half undefinable creature titled Carry on edges and remember not to press (2026). The work features a woman, distinguishing it from the other artworks where figures cannot be clearly identified by gender, and thus signalling a different attention placed by the artist for the character.

Lucrecia Martel’s film La Ciénaga (2001) starts with a hand pouring ice into a glass of red wine. Soon after, we see the full setting: a garden with a murky pool in the very humid province of Salta in Argentina. A group of people drag their chairs unwillingly by the pool’s edges and barely speak to one another as they smoke and refill their glasses. The heat is oppressive and everyone is in their bathing suits. Close by, a kid runs through a densely vegetated mountain with a rifle and a dog, chasing a cow that eventually gets stuck in the mud. There is a storm coming. Both in the pool and in the mountain, there is a sense that something is about to happen; an anticipation of the ordinary becoming extraordinary and vice versa. A similar unsettling mood is present in Van Stenis’ works, where we are quickly roped into the uncanny universes he creates. The artist moved to the isolated Overberg region in 2016, a naturally rich and diverse area located far from the chaos of Cape Town, where he grew up in the 1990s. And although it is difficult to pinpoint timelines in an artist’s processes, this insistence on the unexpected likely stems from his own relationship to natural landscapes, and how he imagines they can be navigated by creatures of this and other worlds. As in Martel’s cinematography, the narratives in Van Stenis’ artworks take shape slowly as they configure their own terms of existence.