Fragments of Time: The Ascending Cathedral

Claude Monet’s  Rouen Cathedral, Evening, Harmony in Brown (1892) captured the Gothic façade bathed in the waning light of dusk, where the interplay of warmth and shadow dissolved its stone architecture into a vibrating field of color. Monet was not painting permanence—he was painting the cathedral as it flickered in and out of form, shaped by the golden-brown hues of evening.  

This abstract conceptual reinterpretation builds upon that transience, deconstructing the cathedral into a fragmented landscape of ascending staircases, floating orbs, and textured layers that dissolve into space. The structure is no longer bound to the earth but suspended within an ethereal dimension, where solidity and weight give way to an architecture of light and motion. The façade remains partially visible, but it is no longer complete. Instead, it emerges and disappears, as if memory itself is reconstructing it piece by piece.  

The staircases stretch upward, leading into the unknown, suggesting a journey not of place but of perception. The orbs act as celestial markers, silent and weightless, emphasizing the dreamlike suspension of time. The rough textures that surround the cathedral blur the boundary between the organic and the architectural, between ruin and reconstruction.  

The harmony of brown, which Monet once used to unify his composition, now becomes a shifting palette of decay and transformation, of past and present coexisting within the same fractured moment. This is not just a reinterpretation of the cathedral—it is an invitation to step into the ephemeral, to ascend through layers of history, vision, and abstraction.  

As an artist, my intention was to explore the way we interact with the past, how it lingers in incomplete forms, how memory alters the solidity of once-familiar spaces. Monet’s brushwork dissolved the cathedral into shifting light; here, it is broken apart and reassembled, climbing through the void, forever ascending, forever unfinished.