Van Scherpenberg understands her performance practice as a form of temporary intervention on the landscape. Furo is a prime example of the artist’s concept of landscape painting, “understood not as the representation of a physical place, but a dialogue with the location using the materials of paint (pigment) and a surrender to the forces of nature and time.” In this work the artist applied iron oxide in a variety of geometric markings and forms across the sand on Boa Viagem beach, Niteroi, RJ, Brazil. The sand in this case acts as the support for this abstract composition.

In the public space of the beach, passers-by interacted with the piece, disrupting her painting and spreading the pigment through the sand as they walked. This photograph captures the work on the cusp of disappearing, as the incoming tide begins to lap at the pool of pigment and carry it out to sea. In some of van Scherpenberg’s more conventional abstract paintings, metals combined with detergents such as saltwater lead to the disintegration of the materials on the surface, possessing an ephemerality similar to that of the pigment on the beach.