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Justin De Verteuil’s intuitive process of picture-making might better be described as “picture-finding.” He seldom starts out with a preconceived final image, but gathers elements, textures, colours and tones as he paints his way towards meaning – or, more accurately, towards the tantalizing intimation of multiple possible meanings. His poignant paintings are meaning generators, rather than meaning transmitters.

For de Verteuil, composing a painting is as much a process of undoing as it is doing. He has revealed that, under the layers of paint, there are usually buried several prior compositions that were subsequently altered or abandoned. These paintings are constructions that, eventually, almost make themselves, coalescing, as if inevitable, from a hazy half-conscious, hypersensitized receptive state that the artist assumes while searching for the right direction. “The images that interest me are never simply arrived at, but more stumbled upon, like slowly turning the dial on a radio back and forth until you finally settle on the right frequency,” he says. Each one of his paintings is the product of the slow passage of time, during which the artist and the artwork get to know each other, de Verteuil trying to ascertain what the nascent painting wants or needs from him.

The title of this exhibition, Magpie on a Morning Gallows, was inspired by a 1568 painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, now in the collection of the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt. Bruegel’s extraordinary painting – conjectured to be his final work, made a year before he died – is actually called The Magpie on the Gallows, but as with de Verteuil’s paintings, the show title went through various deliberate modifications, becoming less descriptive, more suggestive, evolving into an over-arching image to haunt this exhibition.

Befitting this motif of a bird momentarily at rest, the paintings in de Verteuil’s exhibition evince a sense of becoming: of recent arrival, and imminent departure. It is not quite right to say that they seem unfinished, since every part of the canvas is carefully worked, but they feel as if they hold in them the promise of further pictures, further narrative progression. Torero (Wings with me) is a study in stillness contrasted against motion, in which areas of stability abut areas of golden-hour evanescence. Swooping, insubstantial birds and a distant figure, who is walking or maybe even running away from us, swirl around the poised bullfighter, who pins the centre of the composition.

In the large painting Minnesang, parts of faces are left blank, and a figure’s patterned sweater melds, chameleon-like, with the sheet against which he stands. The entire scene seems arranged around a focus invisible to us, the real-world viewers, available only to the protagonists in the picture. As with all of de Verteuil’s work, what is visible is at the service of the invisible.