In Justin Natividad’s current exhibition Sweet Heat, carefully cropped studies of the male form serve as a pretext for the artist’s meticulous observations of light and shadow. More specifically, how they play across the delicate, vulnerable corners of the body in the peak of summer. Observed through a nostalgic lens for the golden hours of summer, sunlight bounces off the smooth surfaces of a pectoral muscle, a protruding rib, a collarbone, and ricochets across the figure towards the viewer.
A vaguely white-pink heat reverberates off the canvas in works like Match Point, a title derived from Luca Guadagnino’s film The Challengers. Natividad’s subjects are painted with an eye for the beauty in the body’s vulnerable crevices-the places that get goose bumps when the wind blows on wet skin. In this sense, they depict a kind of private intimacy, the type felt when gazing unsuspectingly at the back of the neck or corner of a loved one’s mouth.
Each composition is carefully constructed by the artist in his studio, working from hundreds of his own photographs of selected models. Tightly cropped, Natividad often refrains from including the eyes, faces, or limbs of his figures to deflect a solely narrative interpretation of his subjects. This choice, the artist has said, is also a reflection on the popular consumption, or advertisement, of male bodies in glossy magazines as much as on dating platforms – where users often share carefully cropped, idealized images of intimate parts of the male body to bait love or intimacy. Evocative of how many experience Greek and Roman sculpture today, with their lost limbs and perfected musculature, the canvases can too be interpreted like fragments of idealized beauty.
Negative space is used carefully to give movement and breathing space to each composition. The way in which these angled negative spaces take center stage in some of his paintings reminds one of Matisse’s fixations for the same thing- once saying of his practice: “I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.”
Saturated yellows, bright swimsuits, and vintage furniture infuse this body of work with nostalgia. Summer, after all, is more romantic when seen through the rear-view mirror. Peeling the plastic yellow bands of a beach chair from your skin, the smell of sunscreen and salt, the fleeting memories of sun reflecting off a ripple in the pool. The elusive impressions that come to form one’s constructed, fractured, memories of summers past linger in every painting in this exhibition. Having spent time in Italy, some of Natividad’s canvases, such as Lemon 1965, are nods to the ever alluring, faded remnants of 1960s Italian beach culture. In Sweet Heat, the first painting by the artist for this show, a man in reflective goggles stands against a mono-chrome sea-foam sky. Sun beams on the figure from the left, casting his face and right side in partial shadow. Despite seeing his face, he remains anonymous- hidden under a hat, behind white lenses. An archetype for summer. Light is used as a veil of atmosphere. When looking at Natividad’s work for this show, I can’t help but think of the writer Anton Checkhov’s line “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Natividad does just that, with a perceptive eye for the shadow that passing time leaves behind.
Justin Natividad: Sweet Heat, on view at VillageOneArt until July 20
About the writer: Tara R. Keny is an art historian and independent curator. She holds the position of French translator for the Easton Foundation in New York, translating the archives of Louise Bourgeois, and gives regular art lectures in Italy, where she currently resides. Keny received her Master’s degree in the History of Art and Architecture from Boston University, her Bachelor’s Degree from DePaul University (Chicago), and a specialization in 20th-century art from the Ecole du Louvre (Paris). She has held positions in curatorial departments at The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Recent projects include the exhibition “In a New Light: Alice Schille and The American Watercolor Movement,” which she co-curated with Jim Keny at the Columbus Museum of Art (2019) and coordinating the Public Space Artist Commissions (2019) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.