Expressionistic color combinations, frenetic lines and charmingly idiosyncratic shapes characterize the abstract paintings of Jasmine Justice. The paintings, themselves, are roughly square-shaped and rarely more than four feet in width. Their surfaces are richly textured-here, flat and opaque, there, raised and gleaming-an effect Justice achieves through her uninhibited mixture of acrylic, oil and vinyl-based paint. Crowding the walls of the living-room-cum-studio of her apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the paintings jostle for attention, each one daring the viewer to puzzle out its secret narratives. Despite the high Modernist tradition of seeing non-figurative paintings as impersonal studies on color and form, Justice believes that it is human nature to seek narrative in abstraction. Art, in the end, can never transcend its human origins, and paintings can never be just surfaces.
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