In The Ghost, the image of Leopold is subjected to repeated interventions: painted, overpainted, scraped, and repainted. The form is partially removed, yet it persists. Despite its erosion, the figure remains immediately recognisable. The image resists disappearance.

In The King, the image is already displaced before painting begins: a photograph taken from a printed reproduction of a negative, as encountered in the exhibition The Early Gaze at FOMU Antwerp³. The face is overexposed, washed out by concentrated light. This whitening does not clarify the image; it neutralises it, reducing it to a surface of excess visibility.
The paintings do not reconstruct these histories. They register their conditions. What appears is not the figure itself, but its persistence within a field of representation that both fixes and distorts it.

In this sense, the works can be read in relation to an understanding of the image as index, as articulated by Rosalind Krauss⁴: not as a self-contained representation, but as a trace of a prior reality. Both paintings function less as portraits than as sites where visual evidence and historical designation intersect without fully coinciding.