What began as a practical strategy to economize Dekkenga’s practice by painting over discarded paintings evolved into a broader inquiry into the transcendent (virtual?) quality of images. Over time, she became drawn to the contrast between the underlying materiality of the paint and the image painted over the top, a tension that remains central to her work. By blurring boundaries between shapes, she unifies the image while emphasizing its separation from its material foundation. The visual effect encourages a constant shift of focus between two distinct visual phenomena; the underlying texture and the painted image. Similarly, the discordant alignment of image and texture challenges a viewer’s expectations of the painting’s history and requires them to question what they’re seeing and thinking.

Through years of practice, Dekkenga has developed an intuitive command of shape and color, using design software to test formal relationships fluidly, inverting palettes or generating variations in ways traditional media cannot. Over time, the visual language native to computer systems, including specific color relationships and spatial logic, became a subject of the work. Compositional decisions often emerging in response to music, memory, or political events, making her practice deeply personal. This engagement with materiality and the virtual quality of images expanded into a broader inquiry into metaphysics and ontology, as painting became a means of examining selfhood, consciousness, and how technology reshapes our models of understanding, with questions of mind-body dualism and idealism forming a conceptual foundation for her thinking.