About the work

Justin Love
"Ten Year Retrospective"

Grant Gallery, 484 Broome Street, New York, NY 10013
September 07 - September 25, 2000

"the flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting." -Paul Gauguin 

It is not surprising that Justin Love is a musician/composer as well as a visual artist. Many believe the meanings behind musical notes, and the meanings beyond colors, spring from a common source. The major difference is that with music there is no point where you can seize the experience and hold it. Music is on-going sound, and as such continues to become. It can be said that an audible composition lives solely in the world of the imagination, yours and the composer's.

It is not surprising that Justin Love is a musician/composer as well as a visual artist. Many believe the meanings behind musical notes, and the meanings beyond colors, spring from a common source. The major difference is that with music there is no point where you can seize the experience and hold it. Music is on-going sound, and as such, continues to become. It can be said that an audible composition lives solely in the world of the imagination, yours and the composer's.

In his art, Justin Love stills and holds such moments, trapping them within the perimeter of foursquare space and lulling them into submission with sensuous color. With a simplicity of form and plane, Love devises mysterious yet totally convincing images. He nails them down with the riveting presence of physical ecstasy and the hollowed-out spaces of loss. 

Now, when so much art is ironic and distanced, Justin Love cajoles the viewer into an intimate participation. Long before one is aware there is an emotional ransom to be extracted, one falls into his colors as though a lookingglass.

"I choose color as the initital step in involving the viewer. It's emotional content precludes any intellectual process. Once inside the painting, the viewer will usually stay for the whole trip." Justin Love states. There is red beyond ordinary experience, and deep vermilions. Complex blues-cerulean, Ming, cobalt, Prussian, forget-me-not-blacks shadowed with purple and the exultant pyrotechnics of yellow and green. Some of Love's pastels have the theatrical vigor of rose-colored gels; pinks, terra cottas, blazing Iranian reds, the dazzle of gold, a fast streak of magenta. A Daighilev ballet of color; barbaric, exotic, decadent. Everyday hues have undergone some chemical process of intensification. An alchemy of distortion from which they emerge heightened and keyed-up. The viewer has gained admittance into a Commonwealth of Pleasure, a paradiso. Love feels that "each day has its owns colors. I imagine myself colorless, clear, lank...open to the geography and light of that special day. I am not a camera. I think like a prism.

"He believes that color can be as evocative as words. That a pigment holds the exact counterpart of every emotion, every nuance of feeling. This is the visual interpretation of Mallarme's theory of the musicality of poetry where rhymes are structured like microscopic snowflakes, forming intricate constellations through affinity. Certain works are drawn together as iron filings are drawn to a magnet. So it seems that Love's colors are annealed in the magnetic field of his artist's eye into patterns of meaning. Love's paintings are naminally surreal, but voluptuous in their bold allure and seduction of the eye. The cobalts, pinks and purples, and the reverberant blacks are conceptions of a master colorist, without constraint. Love's colors express-they are not meant to describe. His drawing may be jiggly or weighty, but it is never irresolute. He forever eludes integration into reality by jolting, fractured perspectives and by his eccentric formats.

"My studio is the painted world in which I work. I like my paintings stacked and hung and tilted around me. I feel excited by the Byzantine life that colors lead within their baroque and burnished frames" quotes the artist.

Working in Sennelier pastels, some of Love's work has a comic book flavor with speed lines and zappen bullseyes. In his world of dreams and dreaming, these symbols work well. He also shows us the goofy instability of people and objects as they float, untethered, in the deep spaces of nighttime lives. Sometimes a void provokes anguish, and at others, it is a storybook sky where a smiley moon cradles some lost star to sleep. Love knows what we may not-that an ordered, perfectly aligned dream is no dream at all.

"I use symbols as points of departure. Mozart, the Beatles, Lovers, mermaids...the vocabulary of pop culture. "A ticket to ride" says Love. Reassured by the toyland character of Love's fantasies, the viewer is disarmed. Then, with the clipped speech and vocabulary of pure color, he plunges us into a very adult melee with one tender, piercing line. Love can activate a maleficent animism, bloody of claw and lambent of eye; clownish...but exact as a knife. 

Most of Justin Love's pictures are as inviting as a skip down Lollipop Lane, yet there is something in his art that keeps its distance even as it engulfs. It miniaturizes the viewer, yet in another sense the viewer is the grown-up tolerant of such playfulness. so we are led on and on. It is a distillation of sentiment, the essence of experience, and we can contemplate it in safety even while we may be ravished by it. We persuade ourselves of our reason as we set off gaily across Lemonade Lake. 

With Justin Love the viewer seems to be looking through the wrong end of a telescope at a brilliantly clear world with deep perspectives and sharp corners of hallucinatory shadow. The observer accepts this view knowing it is a magic landscape that cannot be verified, but longing to live there all the same.

Justin Love continues to be a musician as well as an artist. He is almost as bemused by the juxtaposition of musical notes as he is by his voyages into Prussian blue. A native of New York, he is self taught and has exhibited worldwide. He lives in Woodstock, the art colony, in upstate New York.