Exhibition Dia-Chronos - A Gentle Decay | Sebastiaan Croonen

A Gentle Decay

The exhibition *A Gentle Decay* grew from the tension between control and the unpredictable.

The photographs are made underwater using flowers and plants that are already approaching the end of their natural life. Once submerged, familiar forms begin to change. Stems bend, petals loosen, air becomes trapped, colours shift and light behaves differently.

Ink and movement are sometimes introduced, but chance remains part of the process.

Croonen constructs and photographs these scenes himself. The work is not AI-generated, nor are its central forms digitally created. What appears in the image happened, for a moment, in front of the camera.

The same attention continues after the photograph has been taken. Each image is developed and prepared individually, and the exhibition prints are produced by the artist himself. From composition and capture to colour, paper and final print, the entire process remains under his control.

At the centre of *A Gentle Decay* is a simple observation: we tend to associate beauty with things at their peak.

But nature rarely works that way.

A flower does not suddenly become meaningless when it begins to fade. Its shape changes. Its colours deepen or disappear. Its structure becomes more fragile and, sometimes, more interesting.

Underwater, that transformation is slowed down just enough to see it.

The photographs are not intended as a rejection of decay, nor as an attempt to make it beautiful. They are an invitation to look at it differently.

To notice what remains.

And perhaps to recognise that beauty does not disappear with time.
It changes.

Sebastiaan Croonen is a Dutch photographer living and working on the Greek island of Tinos.

Photography entered his life through the sea. What began as a frustrating attempt to make underwater photographs gradually became something more deliberate: a way of learning to control light, movement, colour and time in an environment where none of them are entirely predictable.

After moving to Tinos, this fascination found a different direction. Away from a working life largely shaped by numbers, structure and analysis, photography became a place for the opposite: intuition, observation and letting things happen.

His work is characterised by the creation and photography of underwater scenes, with a particular focus on light, movement, colour and the natural transformation of forms.

Nikolaou Gyzi 5, Chora Tinos Island Greece

Νικολαου Γύζη 5, Χώρα Τήνος, Κυκλάδες