Jordan on Green

JORDAN ON GREEN
In 1984, the NBA banned a shoe.
The Air Jordan 1 violated the league's uniform policy — too much colour, too much personality, too much of everything the sport was trying to contain within neat boundaries. Nike paid the $5,000 fine every game Michael Jordan wore them. Jordan wore them every game. And in doing so, turned a pair of trainers into the most culturally significant object in the history of sport — not because of the fine, but because of what the fine revealed: that sometimes the thing that gets banned is the thing that was always going to change everything.
The Air Jordan is not a trainer. It is a declaration.
It says that performance and beauty are not opposites. That what you wear is an extension of who you are. That the person who moves differently, who plays differently, who refuses to make themselves smaller to fit the rules of a game designed before they arrived — that person, if they are good enough and brave enough, rewrites the rules entirely.
Jordan on Green takes that declaration and paints it.
With acrylic, gesso, washi tape and Posca markers on canvas panel, the trainer is transformed — its surfaces carrying the mixed media language of an artist who understands that the boundary between street culture and fine art was always a fiction maintained by people who had something to protect. The plain green ground removes every distraction. There is only the shoe, and what it has always meant, and what it becomes when an artist decides it belongs on a wall.
Some objects are already art before anyone paints them. This one always was.
75.5 × 61 cm · Acrylic, gesso, washi tape and Posca markers on canvas panel · 2022 · One of a kind Unframed. Signed  on the reverse. Certificate of Authenticity included.