Justin de Verteuil
Before and Again
Mar 24th – Apr 19th, 2026
yee society, Hong Kong
A woman stands at the edge of a field as winds begin to move through the tall grass. It approaches gradually – first as a tremor, then as a wave – bending the entire landscape around her. Yet she does not react, she remains absorbed by the shifting air. Nothing announces itself, and still everything changes. The atmosphere gathers before meaning does. And although Justin de Verteuil’s paintings are less about describing their content, this scene, which unfolds in Mirror, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, is where emotion is carried less by action than by air, light, and duration. It is within this register, where space stirs before the figure speaks, that Justin de Verteuil’s paintings begin. His images do not present events so much as conditions. Figures hover within rooms, thresholds, or open landscapes, not asserting themselves but absorbing the quiet pressure of their surroundings. Like weather, meaning accumulates slowly: through colour, gesture, and the subtle disturbance of space itself.
In de Verteuil’s world, the image is not fixed. It is in a continuous state of forming itself, of becoming, of negotiating its own clarity. Every exhibition and every painting is a relative of its progenitor, as none of the images the artist works with ever start entirely from scratch. Therefore, meaning is a slippery variable in the artist’s work that shifts subtly across the surface of each painting. What the viewer encounters is not a fixed narrative but a charged state of suspension shaped by the residue of lived experience
Working with oil, de Verteuil returns consistently to the human figure, yet resists allowing it to dominate the frame. The body is present, often central, but rarely declarative. It does not perform or explain. Instead, it inhabits. Rooms, corridors, expanses of sky or muted interiors seem to exert their own quiet authority. The threshold – between inside and outside, intimacy and exposure – recurs as a subtle structural device. A doorway becomes less a passage than a pause; a window less an opening than a reflective surface. Earlier works of the Düsseldorf-based artist traced the complexities of navigating interpersonal relationships within a broader social fabric. In the recent paintings shown in his exhibition before and Again, however, a shift has taken place. Solitude has entered more fully into the work. While figures remain, their relational dynamics have quieted. Place has assumed greater prominence. Walls, streets, landscapes, fragments of architecture guide the emotional tenor of the image. Even when a figure occupies the centre, it appears to speak less, to recede slightly into its surroundings, as though searching for a more neutral or ambiguous state. This movement toward ambiguity does not imply withdrawal from communication. For de Verteuil, painting is inevitably communicative, yet its language need not be explicit. Each image orients the viewer within a particular atmosphere while simultaneously unsettling certainty.
Process plays a decisive role in cultivating this openness. For the works gathered in the exhibition, de Verteuil began with photographic fragments as points of departure. Rather than refining them toward sharper representation, he allowed the images to loosen. Paint was reworked, passages destabilized, forms permitted to break down. In reversing his earlier method, which often moved from abstraction toward figuration, he began with something grounded in “reality” and gradually released it into painterly ambiguity. What remains is not a transcription of a photograph but a transformed surface where traces of origin coexist with dissolution. Each exhibition emerges as a continuation rather than a rupture. Motifs resurface, altered by time; compositional structures evolve incrementally. A previous idea might serve as the catalyst for a new canvas, not as repetition but as re-examination.
As in the field stirred by wind, nothing overtly occurs. The figure remains where it is, yet the space around it has shifted. Air moves, light alters, pressure gathers and disperses. What changes is not the event, but the atmosphere in which it is held. In de Verteuil’s paintings, this subtle transformation becomes the work itself. Meaning does not declare its arrival; it accumulates quietly, almost imperceptibly, until the entire image feels recalibrated. The viewer stands within this movement – not before a resolved scene, but inside a moment still in the process of becoming.
Text by Claire Koron Elat
yee society
G/F, 24 Upper Street Station
Sheung Wan
Hong Kong
info@yeescociety.com
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