Seraphita – 2026 Series | Özlem Thompson
Throughout 2026 I have been developing Seraphita, a new series of abstract paintings inspired by Honoré de Balzac’s mystical novel Séraphîta. Rather than illustrating the story literally, I have tried to enter its atmosphere: the shifting identities and emotional relationships of its characters, the changing seasons, and the book’s sense of a landscape that is at once physical and spiritual. I imagined mountains, valleys and distant horizons at sunrise and sunset; long luminous days, deep nights, strange gardens and abundant, almost exotic plant life. These imagined places became a way of translating the book into colour, movement and organic form. Across the whole series, the paintings move between intimacy and vastness, between botanical detail and invented terrain, and between the visible world and the interior one.
Ozlem Sorlu Thompson 