Justin Fitzpatrick Ireland, b. 1985

Source: Kerlin Gallery

Justin Fitzpatrick works with painting, sculpture, text and, most recently, video to explore human consciousness through the prism of biology. He presents us with elaborate and fantastical paintings of mysterious figures and mutating forms; sinewy lines evoke art nouveau detailing, fused with gothic and macabre elements. Much of his work contains figurative elements transformed into static, infrastructural ones: the bodies of men become mechanical, forming spaces to inhabit or transit upon. Highly stylised musculoskeletal structures seem visible through the skin, while ornate, vegetal forms and insects link his subjects to the earth, or point towards the interconnectedness of different species. Fitzpatrick’s work is informed by the science around cellular structures (in particular, mitochondria), metaphysical poetry, mythologies, and an array of archetypal figures, often viewed through a lens of class and sexuality.

In Fitzpatrick’s paintings, figurative forms appear enmeshed within complex systems of processes, sounds, memories, and ideas. Bodies morph into musical and mechanical apparatus, while objects become animated or anthropomorphic. In one painting, a human heart is swapped for a glass armonica, an 18th-century instrument with melancholic tones once thought to induce madness. In another, a masked figure plucks at the strings of a suspension bridge, becoming a self-playing Aeolian harp.  Music-playing, and by extension, all creative expression, is positioned as something mediumistic, involuntary, and yet also a source of struggle. In Fitzpatrick’s paintings, however, it also appears to foster a kind of connectivity: spines become injected with musical notes; bodies seem to communicate through diagrammatic wave particles; tangled webs of veins, nerves, and arteries imply a porosity of self, a consciousness that expands beyond our physical bodies.