“The impression Justine Duhayon’s work makes is immediate. It does not take long to notice the rhythmic pulses of her painterly technique. There is no depth of field, yet one can still find the harmony in the chaos of the drips and shapes. Duhayon’s works capture and express her love for the vibrant city of New York. In her first series, New York in Motion, she uses mountains of newspapers, gravel, and other mixed media to physically represent NYC skylines and street life. Her experiences and need for exploration are clearly marked by her use of text, street names, and magazine cutouts that are fearlessly floating on the canvas like open pages of a scrapbook. However, as Justine keeps on returning to NYC, and fulfilling her contagious love for travel and conversation, her works start to become more intuitive and personal. Her second series, Travels of a Mind, emerges away from archaic representations and symbols of city architecture in a way that clearly show she walks through them like a flaneuse. In a manner reminiscent of the NY Abstract Expressionists fifty years ago, Duhayon arrives at the non-figurative, where diverging strands of paint, both thick and fragile, reveal the movement, the vibrancy, and the influence of a quick mind in a fast-paced city. She fearlessly mixes genres, mediums, and color palettes in her works, such as COBRA movement browns with bright reds on top. Her work bleeds off the canvas unboundedly. She attacks and tames the limits of a blank canvas with her bare hands as brushes and her body as a planet rotating around this linen universe of her ideas. She spends an artist’s evening, a canvas for a night, until her room and clothes are covered in acrylic evidence. And if you want to touch the sharp and curved textures of her paintings to find out where she has been, you should just ask her. With smiling eyes, she would be happy to tell you all about it.”

Anastasia Vartsaba

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