Exhibition · Podium Gallery · Hong Kong
PODIUM is proud to present ‘Halfway Across the Rubicon’, Rotterdam-based artist Luis Xertu’s first solo presentation with the gallery and in Asia. In this new body of paintings, Xertu unfolds a tender, sun-drenched world where the fleetingness of love, beauty, and youth lingers like the last light of summer. He traces delicate passages of intimacy within and beyond friendship, attending to a bittersweet ambivalence shaped by quiet tensions, hidden desires, and unspoken affections that surface as both excess and residue through the fissures of the grammar of social life. The exhibition opens on 19 September (Sat), from 2 to 7 PM, and remains on view through 21 November (Sat). Rooted in the same sensibility of time’s quiet passing, Xertu’s practice extends this meditation through his distinctive use of organic matter and process. He incorporates dried flora and foliage—materials that gradually shift from verdant green to autumnal tones—allowing each work to unfold like a slowed cinematic sequence. These evocative scenes are encapsulated beneath a translucent layer of gel that at times form gentle ripples around figures submerged in water, at others create subtle spatial depth that draws the eye inward. Throughout his oeuvre, Xertu returns to recurring backdrops reminiscent of the theatrical black box, imbuing each composition with a sense of performative stillness and poetic suspension. Here, however, this gravitas is tempered by a palette of cream, violet, and rose, lending the works a newfound lightness and intricacy of touch. Xertu also recently explores the dialogue between movement and stillness through a balance of silkscreen precision and painterly intuition—printing liquid ink on damp canvas in successive variations until one surface attains its rhythm, a texture hovering between appearance and disappearance, like memory itself dissolving beneath water’s skin. The exhibition title draws on the small river in north-eastern Italy that once marked a decisive…