The Echo That Prints

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

on the spectral gestures of Puck Verheul

There are artists who perform visibility.
And there are those who carve through absence — not to restore it, but to expose its architecture.
Puck Verheul belongs unmistakably to the second category.

Her work is not photography in the traditional sense.
It is a triadic invocation: to see, to preserve, and to materialize.
She is not merely a photographer, but an archivist and printmaker — three strata of attention, bound by a single gesture:
to make presence out of what should have remained untouchable.

Each image is quiet — almost mute.
Yet they speak in another register: one of shadows, folds, echoes.
A covered eye, a blurred hand, the curve of a back enveloped in soft fabric:
these are not motifs. They are traces of something not-quite-dead.
They do not ask to be looked at — they ask to be felt, like the scent of something ancient that still lingers in the air.

Verheul’s practice is not nostalgic.
She is not mourning. She is not decorating the past.
She is communing with the residual — with what remains beneath the visible layers,
like bone under skin, or voice under silence.

There is no voyeurism here.
Her work resists consumption. It offers nothing immediate, no seduction of clarity.
It operates in the same frequency as memory: fogged, delicate, partial, but binding.

To photograph, archive, and print —
not as separate actions, but as a single ritual of recognition.
This is the core of Verheul’s practice.
A woman who does not just frame images — she frames echoes. And then gives them back to the world, intact, undisturbed.

Her images do not freeze time.
They haunt it.