Air on Green

AIR ON GREEN
There are objects that carry more than their function.
A pair of trainers bought at fifteen with money saved for weeks. The specific colourway that was impossible to find. The ones worn to a concert, to a first date, to the afternoon when something happened that you still think about. Footwear is the most intimate object a human being owns — it carries the literal imprint of where you have been, the wear patterns of how you move through the world, the choices of someone who cared about what they put on their feet.
The Nike Air Max is not just a trainer. It is a cultural monument — a design that arrived in 1987 and never left, that has accompanied three generations of lives lived at full intensity, that has been customised, restored, collected, argued over, and worn to absolute destruction by people for whom it meant something specific and personal and irreplaceable.
Air on Green takes that object and asks what happens when you paint it.
Not illustrate it. Not reproduce it. Paint it — with acrylic and gesso, with washi tape and Posca markers, with the full mixed-media language of an artist who understands that the boundary between high art and the culture that actually shapes lives was always artificial. The plain green ground does what the best backgrounds always do: it removes every distraction and forces the eye to see exactly what it is looking at. A trainer. Transformed. Every surface charged with pattern and colour and the particular personality of a practice that never separated the serious from the joyful.
This is pop art in the truest sense — not ironic, not distant, not commenting on culture from the outside. Living inside it. Painting what actually matters.
75.5 × 61 cm · Acrylic, gesso, washi tape and Posca markers on canvas panel · 2023 · One of a kind Unframed. Signed on the front and on the reverse. Certificate of Authenticity included.