Art Spiel · July 2024
Writing for Art Spiel, Tara Keny considered how Sweet Heat sets light and shadow against the male form — tightly cropped studies that hold onto the fleeting warmth of a summer afternoon.
Justin Natividad’s recent exhibition Sweet Heat was reviewed by Tara Keny for Art Spiel, which considered how the show plays light and shadow against the male form. Working in tight crops, Natividad renders the particular warmth of a summer afternoon, drawing the eye toward the body’s most sun-exposed points of contact.
The review singled out Match Point — a painting inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s film Challengers — for a heat that seems to radiate directly off the canvas in tones of white and pink. Across the exhibition, Keny noted, Natividad’s subjects are typically stripped of identifying features — no eyes, no faces, no limbs — so that attention settles instead on isolated, intimate passages of the body, an approach the review compared to the way classical Greek and Roman sculpture is often encountered today: in fragments.
Keny also pointed to the exhibition’s use of negative space and saturated yellow tones as a way of conjuring nostalgia, evoking a summer already receding into memory. The show’s title work, Sweet Heat, depicting a man in reflective goggles with his identity withheld, was described as archetypal of the season itself.
Drawing on time spent in Italy and an interest in 1960s beach culture, Natividad’s paintings invite viewers into a romanticized, sun-drenched vision of summer.
Read the full review at Art Spiel.
For inquiries regarding available works by Justin Natividad, please contact info@villageoneart.com.