“If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred.” - Walt Whitman

 Justin Bower says that his main aim as an artist is to “make images that resonate today and which could only be made in this era.” His art is indeed contemporary, but it is also rooted in the ancient notion of the sacred. One way to understand this connection is to step back in time 1,000 years and consider how the depiction of holy presences in religious art can be seen as the foundation of Bower’s exploration of the contemporary body in the context of today’s omnipresent technology.

Imagine yourself as a Medieval pilgrim, trudging along dusty roads towards sacred destinations whose splendor draws you like a moth to a flame. Upon your arrival at a grand cathedral—perhaps Chartres or Santiago de Compostela—you would wait in crowded aisles for your chance to enter one of the many chapels devoted to holy figures. Upon entering you would glimpse a sacred icon, a tiny panel depicting the Virgin or another saint set against a gilded background, lit solely by flickering candlelight. Remember that this breathtaking glimpse of a single perfect visage is taking place centuries before mechanically produced images flooded books, televisions, monitors and movie screens. Prior to the invention of the camera, sacred images were only revealed in visions, icons or precious illuminated manuscripts.

Bower’s art aims to accomplish the very same thing as a saint painted in tempera by a Medieval monk, which is to embody the sacred in visual form. The feeling you would have had, in the era when the church held a monopoly on the miraculous, is the same feeling you should have now when you stand in front of a Justin Bower painting: one of awe and revelation. Bower’s paintings are 21st century icons that tell us what it feels like to be alive now, when technology facilitates and necessitates a new set of spiritual and existential questions.

Those questions include how we are affected by the electronic screen-based images that dominate our attention. Screens are now universal and ubiquitous and they are the only thing most people find as visually arresting as medieval pilgrims found icons to be. The phone in your purse or pocket can now instantly produce and display something that was once incredibly rare: a credible picture of a human face or body. As a painter Bower is interested in going past the recognizable towards something much more subjective and harder to grasp since he sees contemporary life as destabilized and in constant flux.

The boundaries between real experience and the flood of electronic images that surround and fascinate us have been almost entirely erased. Beginning with his “Genuflection” paintings, which feature exploding heads locked into dynamic environments, Bower has used his art to explore the idea that technology has woven itself into our lives so profoundly that it has infused and changed awareness of reality. Often multiplying eyes and other “sense organs” Bowers creates a universe of hyperawareness that is both fragile and explicit. The questions he raises—“Are we dissolving?” and  "Are we becoming something different?”—are activated by his powerful brushwork and electric color choices which interweave recognizable imagery with the flux of abstraction.

Art history itself also seeps into Bower’s paintings, enriching the flow of ideas and adding references. Because the internet has made the entire history of art available at the click of a mouse, iconic images once sequestered in faraway museums of reproduced between the covers of expensive books are now grist for the mill of mass experience. In Bower’s art one can see the influence of Willem De Kooning—who called himself a “slipping glimpser—in the prevalence of female portraits that he disassembles and moves towards abstraction. Hints of Alberto Giacometti’s taut spatial scribbling and Francis Bacon’s blurred grimaces are there too. Intentional or not, Bower has a connection to Warhol in his realization that media imagery has magnified and multiplied the power of iconic presences.

Bower’s most recent canvases features full figures that inhabit quasi-architectural environments, both stark and palatial. These figures—whether seated or suspended— seem held in place by unseen forces. Some have appendages that flare into swords or morph into haloed outlines. The spectral figure of the artist Jackson Pollockappears in one series, sometimes as a floating Oz-like head and sometimes as a disrupted figure seated in a Cubist wing chair floating in a matrix of arresting stripes and circuit-like geometry. In these environments it feels like abstraction is, in some unexpected way, reconfiguring the emanations of the man whose paintings brought abstract art into the mainstream.

Full of patterns, pulses, glitches and glimmers, Bower’s canvases mix the recognizable with the evanescent. His palette feels electrified and intentionally limited. Contradictions abound, especially in the way that forms seem to float in place even as conflicting energies and dynamic forms threaten their stability. Illusions that have the clarity of photography are interspersed with painterly inventions that only a brush loaded with paint could create. Patterns, haloes, stripes and latticework offer hints of order that are violated by energy of slashes and drips of paint. Some forms feel dissected, others violate planes like X-rays. Each painting embodies and set of questions and a search for something that simply can’t be found. The finished works feel paradoxically monumental yet temporary, as if they might simply be arresting flickers on a glitchy screen.

Beginning in the early 2000s Bower says that he felt as if he had left behind the “secular feeling” of the Industrial Revolution and moved towards a kind of “new Baroque” that put its faith in technology. In the years since, Bower has taken his art so far forward that it now carries a hint of science fiction. “I feel like I am just now breaking free from all the infrastructure,” he notes. “I feel like the paintings can now emanate or truth or idea that can only be expressed in paint.” The role of technology, which Bower feels can “seamlessly” weave into his painted explorations, feels inevitable as both a metaphor and tool for progress.

One anecdote that Bower likes is this: “When someone asked Chat GPT, which is a form of artificial intelligence, ‘Is there a God?’ it responded ‘There never was, but there is one now.’” In Bower’s art you feel a similar assertion, that a new kind of unseen hand is guiding both his brush and the human future he is attempting to illuminate. In the immediacy and electricity of Bower’s painted heads and bodies there is a striking sense of aliveness that generates a new visual language of sacred possibilities. 

Justin Bower Museum Show at Riverside Museum Los Angeles - September 2023!