• Chicago Tribune "In the Galleries" (April 10, 2009)
  • by Alan G. Artner

  • Jasmine Justice: The first solo exhibition in Chicago—at 65GRAND—for this New York painter has nine abstract canvases that toy with the language of early modern abstraction as a way of (in the artist's words) "playing dress-up in Grandfather's clothing." As is often the case with young painters, Justice is suspicious of a signature style and tries to avoid one by embracing (among other things) hard-edge geometry; mottled, thinly brushed passages and metallic paint. Nevertheless, there are the constants of brilliant color and an often febrile line that jolts her compositions, giving some a dynamism beyond mischievousness. The best of this animates "Blue Screen," a square with a centrifugal all-over pattern that is at the same time seriously explosive and frisky as a Tex Avery cartoon. Elsewhere, Justice is unafraid to be "decorative," in passages evoking the dense pattern-making of late 19th Century French painters or the landscapes-in-transformation of an abstract pioneer such as Frantisek Kupka.