From Style to Discipline: Structural Notes Toward Silent Monumentalism

Image 1 — Hand Notes Sketch

Image 2 — Structural Block Study

By Pieter Lategan — Personal Working Notes
16 January 2026, Pretoria, South Africa

This post records a moment of transition in my practice — from searching for a visual style to committing to a structural discipline.

Silent Monumentalism is not built through symbolism, emotion, or narrative.
It is built through structure: mass, weight, resistance, and restraint.

My recent sketches explore this discipline through a limited structural exercise using only three elements:

1. The figure

2. Architectural pressure

3. Background as resistance

Rather than inventing a new form, I consciously studied the seated structure of Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude (1907) — not for its colour, sensuality, or expression, but for its compressed mass and seated gravity.

I do not adopt Matisse’s bold colour language. In Silent Monumentalism, colour dominance creates noise and narrative. Stillness must operate before meaning, not through emotional cues. Any reference to blue in my work is subdued, absorbed into grey tonal structure — not to speak, but to carry weight.

The figure in this study is intentionally stripped of theatrical nudity, expressive gesture, and invitation. What remains is a body treated as structure — heavy, grounded, and resistant to interpretation. The posture does not perform. It does not persuade. It exists.

Behind the figure, architectural blocks do not describe a setting. They act as pressure. The background is not empty space — it is resistance. Like air displaced by a wall, negative space here is defined by what cannot exist there.

This work does not belong to a time. It does not reference a moment or event. It is meant to function in any time — not as an image to decode, but as a presence to encounter.

My background in design — medals, graphic systems, branding, and web architecture — has shaped this discipline deeply. Design teaches restraint, hierarchy, and structure. It teaches that speed creates decoration, while slowness builds clarity.

Silent Monumentalism demands slow thinking because it removes shortcuts. It rejects decoration. It refuses story. It leaves the viewer alone — not out of coldness, but out of respect.

These sketches are working notes. They may never become finished paintings. Their purpose is structural understanding, not resolution.