A small sticker on the stretcher of this early painting by Jef Verheyen mentions Galeria Pater in Milan. This gallery can certainly be called a hub, not only for our painting, but also for the artist himself. In 1958, he had his first exhibition outside of Belgium there. A year earlier he had met Lucio Fontana and Roberto Crippa in Milan's Via Borgonuovo, who from then on would inspire and accompany him as artist friends, like-minded people. Fontana also arranged the exhibition at Galeria Pater for him, where he showed his explorations of color and its wealth of nuances for the first time. The presence of color in its subtle and diverse variants lies like a delicate veil over our canvas. Jef Verheyen finds his way to the painterly at a time when Tachisme and Informalism were the dominant art movements in Europe. He followed a path that is comparable to that of Gotthard Graubner. This path led through the exploration of color. For him, it all started with the examination of black: in 1956, he showed his monochrome black pictures at the ‘Deutsche Buchgemeinschaft’ in Antwerp. In the years that followed, he opened up to white, and later gold, silver, brown while smoke also entered his work. Our painting shows the impact of a smoky black on the underlying color. It's like a smoky cloud that sweeps over the dawn. This painting is a special testament to his early exploration of color and light, two themes that the artist would never let go of. [EH]