Palm Beach Artworks on Display: Explore the Current Space

Isabelle Scheltjens arrived at her defining technique entirely by chance: in her husband’s glass workshop, she made a portrait of her daughter from fragments of colored glass. The result surprised her. It surprised the people who saw it. What it revealed, a method in which precision and optical chance could coexist, in which a legible image could dissolve into pure color and geometry depending only on where you stood, became the foundation of everything she has made since.

Her glass fusing process is unlike anything else in contemporary portraiture. Working with up to twenty thousand hand-cut pieces of glass, each no larger than three millimeters, in varying colors, textures, and densities, Scheltjens builds her works in two or three layers, then fires the entire composition at over 800 degrees Celsius. What emerges is a single fused surface: from close range, a field of color, geometry, and light with no clear image; from across the room, a portrait that crystallizes into startling resolution. The effect recalls the pointillist logic of Georges Seurat translated into three-dimensional material, color achieved through accumulation rather than blending, presence built through tens of thousands of decisions the viewer never consciously registers.

Her work has been exhibited in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Dubai, Amsterdam, and London. “Urban Chicca,” on view in West Palm Beach. 

learn more about isabelle Scheltjens