" UNTITLED 5 " Painting

Justin Person is a French-based artist whose studies in Graphic Design and Fine Arts serve as an influence for the artworks he creates both outdoors and indoors. His artistic practice is broad, often featuring familiar characters whose identity has been masked or blurred; our favorite childhood heroes, such as Popeye and Felix the Cat, stripped of color and painted in pitch black, as if they are now nothing more than mere shapes and stains of ink. Do they lose their identity once they face is wiped out? Are we still able to recognize them? They appear to have become a part of a larger concept created by Justin Person, one that has a lot more to do with social landscape we actually live in. At times, these characters are even referenced by motifs from classical art, once again evoking familiar scenery that we’re still not sure if we can identify. Icons of Highbrow and Pop Culture at Urban Spree The minimalist, yet structured artworks of Justin Person evoke his anarchic spirit towards hierarchies in general and in his artistic production. Drawing inspiration from both pop culture and highbrow, the artist creates mysterious, quite abstract characters that serve as the icons of many generations past and future, and that ooze with the spirit of street art, another creative field he is interested in. While outside, he sometimes works on the walls by engraving them, for his studio works he employs materials such as ink and acrylic to express the depth of his color and the scenery alike. The anonymity of these figures calls for an interpretation, an investigation into that world and the one around us as well, and make us question the idea of roles that have somehow been assigned to all of us, as members of modern-day society. Equipped with simplicity and humor, the artworks of Justin Person leave lots of space for ambivalence, as they introduce a unique kind of aesthetics that mix graphic techniques with contemporary painting. wildwall 2016 Angie Kordic