Justin de Verteuil’s paintings appear as images in the midst of becoming: compositions that have been coaxed slowly into focus, as if tuned across radio frequencies until a signal emerges from the ether and begins to take shape. His works hover between legibility and uncertainty, where memories shimmer into and out of focus, and the feeling of a time and place emerges before the specifics of a narrative do. de Verteuil’s paintings generate meaning the way weather forms: gradually, atmospherically, out of shifting pressure systems of colour, gesture, and the fugitive traces of experience. 

de Verteuil draws his subjects from lived moments with friends and loved ones, time spent in resonant places, and the immediacy and nuances of life around him. However, these sources are mutable starting points; he paints through them, over them, under them, letting compositions accrue and dissolve. What eventually surfaces is not an illustration of an event, but a state of perception suspended between remembering and imagining. 

This sense of fluidity extends to the architectures and figures that occupy the paintings. In these compositions, forms rhythmically blur or sharpen into focus, they drift in space or provide moments of perceptual anchoring, and their colours emerge as if answering to the logic of a parallel reality. Rooms, landscapes, and portals open into environments that are both believable and impossible. These are not scenes we can fully enter; they exist on a thin membrane between the world inside the painting and our own. This enigmatic threshold space doesn’t reveal easy answers but rather gently guides us toward an emotional frequency. 

These paintings linger in that space where the specifics of an experience flicker close to the surface, only to recede again just out of reach. Across these works, de Verteuil traces not only the texture of contemporary life—its restlessness, tenderness, estrangements, and the small moments that stick in your chest—but also the impossibility of trying to hold on to those things. He leaves us with the ghosts of a time and place and an invitation to accept that which remains elusive.