We Were Meant to Meet

Everything begins with a minimal gesture. A phrase written on the canvas in white: not as a title, nor as a declaration, but as a drawn memory. A clue that connects you with someone, with a moment that has left a mark on your life. This is how each of Ike’s paintings is born: from a memory, from a phrase that holds emotional resonance. A starting point as intimate as it is powerful.

In Ike’s pictorial process there is no intention of representing anything concrete, but rather of exploring the ungraspable: color, texture, space. His work is openly abstract and non-figurative, but his methodology brings him closer to conceptual painting. Simple instructions that he imposes on himself: write a meaningful phrase, cover it with layers of color, work the background, make intense pigment gestures. Layer upon layer, the image reveals itself, and with it, something deeper: a lived experience, an encounter, an emotion.

The process is as important as the result. And although Ike plans everything carefully, he leaves room for intuition. He knows when a work is finished because the process tells him so: not through logic, but through internal resonance.

Living in rural Ireland, on a family farm that has been passed down through six or seven generations, shapes his artistic sensibility. Being immersed in nature is, for him, like inhabiting a canvas in motion. “Dwelling in nature is like sitting inside a painting,” he says. That phrase summarizes his way of approaching art: embracing uncertainty, allowing himself to be surprised.

Nature —like painting— is unpredictable. It has no rules, offers no guaranteed results. That is why Ike paints mostly in the afternoon, in solitude, in an act of introspection where memory, landscape, and perception fuse. But there is also in his work a quiet reflection on the digital present, where human interactions have become brief, filtered, often empty.

This series of works emerged from a transformative experience: walking the Camino de Santiago with his son. On that journey, Ike became aware of his own isolation and his need to reconnect. In the midst of that physical and spiritual journey, he began to open up to casual encounters with strangers, to meaningful conversations that left a mark. Phrases like “The illusion of endless options” became part of the pictorial process, poetic registers of an encounter, almost like traces of a human connection.

Translating that spiritual experience into pictorial language is not simple. But Ike does it through an intimate ritual that mixes introspection with presence: challenging himself to meet someone new, to write down a phrase, and from that gesture, begin a new painting.

“We Were Meant to Meet” speaks of the beauty of the unexpected. Of authentic connection in times of disconnection. In each painting, Ike captures that fleeting spark in which two paths cross —in a conversation, a phrase, a glance— and turns it into something lasting. A silent testimony that sometimes art has the strange ability to remind us that we are not alone.

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