What happens after the gaze? What remains when observation is no longer enough? After the Gaze, the new chapter by Jesperish, begins exactly at this threshold. If Netra held the gaze as a sacred gesture, abstract, symbolic, transcendent. After the Gaze surpasses it. It’s no longer about watching. It’s about acting. About embodying what has been seen. About crossing the threshold and returning to the self.

As the artist writes, Netra was created “from above,” from a distance, an abstract, symbolic, and spiritual vantage point. A grammar of elsewhere. But After the Gaze is flesh and breath. It’s pulse, descent, and reckoning. A return to the body after years of emotional dissociation. A visual confession, where the lens is no longer a filter, but a mirror.

In this sense, Jesperish gives visual form to what Roland Barthes described as studium and punctum, not as opposites, but as successive phases. The studium of his earlier work, symbolic knowledge and contemplative distance, is now transformed into punctum: a wound that pulses, an act that marks. No longer theory of the heart, but practice of the heart.

From Observation to Action: Spirituality as Discipline

At the core of this collection lies the idea of action as the natural consequence of seeing. “To act is to live the truth you’ve seen,” Jesperish writes. It’s a spiritual gesture, but also a political one. In a world wired for distraction and addicted to dopamine, action becomes a form of rebellion. Not heroism, but coherence. The transformation of knowledge into being. The embodiment of insight.

This transition from abstraction to action recalls Gaston Bachelard’s belief that true imagination is not escapism, but rootedness. Jesperish excavates his inner landscape not to flee, but to remain. To build a visual language that speaks not in symbols, but in embodied experience.

Six Stages of Inner Alchemy

The six works that make up the collection are steps in an interior transformation: a kind of contemporary via crucis of the self. But instead of guilt and martyrdom, we find vulnerability, awareness, surrender, and return.

The Giver opens the cycle with the primordial gesture: giving. Giving as generosity, as instinct, as willingness to show up, even when it hurts.

Distorted Memories explores what happens when that giving is not met, when it goes unseen. Memory bends under the weight of unmet needs, reshaped by emotion, blurred by pain.

Betrayal of the Sacred Spine is the rupture. The painful realization: I didn’t give from love, I gave from need. An act that betrays one’s alignment, one’s inner child, one’s backbone. But even this betrayal contains the seed of rebirth.

Self Seen is the moment of reckoning. The mirror clears. The self, in all its layers and masks, appears. There is grief, but also liberation.

Zoals de ziener zoekend tracht, en zo zijn pijn verzacht (Like the seer who seeks, and so eases his pain) is the conscious search. A deeply spiritual gesture, not for answers, but for the courage to witness without turning away.

The Perceptionist closes the cycle with a shift in perspective. The self dissolves into multiplicity. Every version, every memory, every mirror is integrated. Nothing needs to be held too tightly anymore.