Symmetry is the backbone of Raymond Lemstra’s work, in which two circles – on either side of the dividing line between two halves of a mirrored image – always return. This basic form keeps his work from being completely abstract, as it inevitably is interpreted as a pair of eyes. ‘That form is so embedded in our visual lexicon as the sign for an eye that we immediately recognize it as such, whether that was the original intention or not.’ Despite this phenomenon of pareidolia (the imagined perception of human features), which makes us see his images as mask-like ‘portraits’ with an individual character and expression, he eschews all narrative. The placement of one form determines the next, in an associative sequence of actions.