Artist Statement:
The core of my practice consists of paintings that are built out of networks and connections. The structure of digital software informs their compositions, often leading to a fragmented surface depicting multiple objects and figures interacting. The painted field can act as a screen, presenting a mixture of flatness, depth, and compounding layers, both in the perceived picture plane and physically as layers of paint are built up. Connections are suggested between separate internal pictures (either simply by proximity or perhaps by their shared visual characteristics) creating a network that spreads across the painting, acting like an electrical circuit or a nervous system. Social media platforms, forums and archives are trawled for imagery, encouraging a clash of genres and styles and as a way of processing the mass of semi-conscious data that represents the digital zeitgeist. The compositions often echo mind maps, investigation pin-boards or conspiracy theory diagrams.
I continually gather and archive reference images in an ongoing process unrelated to specific pieces, allowing the images time to filter through my mind. The slow process of painting allows the significance of images to alter with time, their meaning often changing in their application. Images in my archive are chosen instinctively, reacting to my conscious and unconscious dialogues. Sometimes they act as symbols that point to wider ideas, hovering in ambiguity until the work is complete. I often intertwine historical imagery with the hyper-modern, choosing to explore related themes in a non-chronological manner.
The process of painting reintroduces a tactility and sculptural quality to images taken from the flat screen of cyberspace, giving a solid and weighted form to what was once metaphysical. I pay attention to the surface whilst painting, combining various textures and consistencies informed by the varying attributes of each image. This interplay between the physical and the ethereal in the material process also forms part of my thinking process. The concept of transcendence has occupied my interest throughout my artistic practice. More specifically, the notion of an individual shedding their physical form in response to a dramatic event instigated either from within or inflicted by an outside source. This idea is informed by my research into Bataille’s theory of ‘limit experiences’, where people are described as having emotional and spiritual experiences brought on by extreme pain or pleasure. For this reason, I have worked with images that depict acts of violence and eroticism and combined them with images representing spirituality (such as images found in historical Catholic art) to explore similarities in ideas of the sacred and profane. In my dissertation, I linked Batailles’ limit experiences to Rudolf Otto’s concept of numinous dread, observing that fear and violence are often a precursor to spiritual experience.
Ideas of the holy, violence and eroticism lend well to the aesthetics of gothic art, a genre which, among other things, demonstrates the relationship between horror and spirituality, making the Gothic a natural area of my research. Gothic aesthetics also make up a significant part of internet culture, linking my interest in spirituality back to my exploration of digital culture. In this research, I have noticed interesting similarities between historical ideas of religious experience and experiences of communicating online. For example, the goal of some ancient meditation practices sounds very similar to communicating in an online community: an individual transcends their singular, material existence and joins with an immaterial, wider network of consciousness. These ideas of the cyclical nature of transformation from physical to metaphysical, and then back again are echoed in the process of my painting.
Artist Biography:
Louis Loveless was born in Ronaldshay Housing Estate in Finsbury Park in 1995. At four years of age, he and his family moved to Hackney and lived there until 2023, when they moved to Harlow. He attended primary school in Clapton and Secondary School in Tufnell Park, before staying on and studying at LaSwap Sixth Form College. After graduating Sixth Form, Loveless studied at the Royal Drawing School Foundation Year where he was trained in traditional techniques of painting and drawing. He then studied the first year of a Graphic Design BA at Buckinghamshire New University before taking a year out to work and then changed to a Fine Art BA at the University of East London. From 2022-24 Loveless studied on the Advanced Painting postgraduate course at the Essential School of Painting, whilst also working there as a technician. He enters competitions, applies for residencies and is open for commissions.
Exhibitions:
“60digits” (Group Show)
The Essential School of Painting, 2024
“Pivotal” (Group Show)
Karamel Club, 2024
“The Harlow Open” (Group Show)
The Gibberd Gallery, Harlow Civic Centre, 2024
“Fell Down a Well As Well” (Group Show)
The Essential School of Painting, 2023
“Raid.R: Office Party” (Group Show)
Millbank Tower, 2023
“Hackney Art Fest” (Group Show)
Deviant & Dandy Brewery, 2022
“Self Conscious” (Group Show)
The Art Pavillion, Mile End Park, 2020
“The Muse Gallery Residency Shortlist Show” (Group Show)
The Muse Gallery, 2020
“ING Discerning Eye Prize” (Group Show)
Online Event, 2020
“Dennis Beckton” (Group Show)
Way Out East Gallery & Online Event, 2020
“Data Fatigue” (Solo Show)
E5 Process, 2020
“Not for the Faint Arted” (Group Auction)
The Nunnery Gallery, 2019
“Victim of the Arts” (Group Show)
Thames-Side Studios Gallery, 2019
“Time Team: An Exhibition of Bronzes” (Group Show)
Way Out East, 2017
“Spare Blems” (Group Show)
Way Out East, 2018
“Herding Cats” (Group Show)
Way Out East, 2017
“Royal Drawing School Foundation Year Exhibition” (Group Show)
Trinity Buoy Wharf, 2017
Creative industry positions:
Studio Technician, The Essential School of Painting
Gallery Assistant, Royal Society of Sculptors
Art Handler, Coombs Contemporary
Host, Barbican Centre
Ticket Sales Advisor, Barbican Centre
Steward/Group Leader, William Morris Gallery
Technician, Mesh Screen Print and Photography
Technician, Capisco Ltd. Patinator
A review by Giuseppe Marasco
Louis Loveless: The Heap Painting series
Loveless contends with a generational exploration and catharsis, we are at a time when the world has become an extreme present, where the future is too uncertain to easily daydream new possibilities. The Millennials and Zennials face a series of systemic challenges that throw into question the many guarantees enjoyed by previous generations. The disparity between expectations and lack of agency is the producer of anxiety and burnout.
His paintings are like islands or towers of Babel. They are painted with energetic backgrounds that have contrasting energies to the collaged elements which are rendered in multiple languages, some carefully in photorealism, in thick impasto, or loosely free from regard of the image’s authority loosely handled as if the hard insistent image is about to slip off after having decomposed into something semi fetid.
The speed of the internet and the question of the value of an image produces instability. How do we structure our image of the world? How do we create our maps of meaning when everything is swipeable? Instead, we invest in what we want to honour, and in turn, this makes us. We become witnesses and create duration and intensity as opposed to quickly consumptive commodities and entertainment.
The ‘attention economy’ is the real intent of social media, rewiring our brains through dopamine hits. In contrast, painting is a richly serotonin-rewarding economy that offers a grounding, centring coherence, allowing the person to synthesise new worlds in response to their bodies and environments, not the distant undisclosed space of the digital realm, with its true location purposefully withheld, that holds its idealised promise as a punishing spectre of a place that you will never be, a horizon you will never enter. Painting reminds you that the sublime is located within you, in the act of connecting this experience with the other in an act of communication, with the simple statement through action: “I was here. I share this with you. I am with you in this act.”
There is a sense of liberation in Loveless’s recent works, the imagery is freed from the hidden ideology and the libidinal economies of images colonising our visual landscape, Loveless connects directly with these little mountains of consumerist scrap junk, created from the discarded excess from collaging, from which the objects of desire have been extracted. The paintings are composed of piles of the leftover waste of the ‘desire industry’, various luxuries, bodies, and sublime landscapes have been punched out and the part normally unnoticed is given in its place. More than ever, it is a generational question; how do you navigate images when the nature of their provenance, and purpose are so carefully submerged? A time of hidden ideologies.
It was often a medieval practice to take any object (particularly that which was lowly or considered waste) as an object of meditation. It was visited with intellectual attention to discover its value in the grand scheme of creation. This theological activity inherently contained within itself humour and release from our self-imposed or externally imposed tyranny of the hierarchy of values.
The times we live in may be thought of as ‘brink times’: political, economic, social and environmental structures on the brink of systemic change without a clear pathway or means to imagine a new future. When this takes place an inordinate amount of energy is expended in anxiety, as individuals seek security in any fixed point or recognisable narrative that will at least offer a common direction and safety in numbers.
The Philosopher Giambattista Vico analysed that the imagery of a society changes when there is a huge shift in politics and power. At present, we are in a cultural shift that leaves us without clarity or a crystallising sense of the image or the narrative of our times. Historically, art schools have acted as laboratories where the individual operates in a community, working out the nature of creating images that the individual is personally invested in and how they connect to a wider public discourse. Going through the process of painting is to work with ideas that have materialities, that are embodied, felt and made through the limit of the body and are reflective of that constraint. The reality and experience of the artist are captured in the painting, and this reacts with the nervous system of the viewer.