What is love?

WHAT IS LOVE?
The philosopher asks it from behind a desk. The poet asks it at three in the morning. The songwriter asks it and gets a number one hit. Everyone asks it eventually, and the answers are always personal, always partial, always more specific than the question suggests.
For some people, part of the answer looks like a trainer.
Not sentimentally — genuinely. The Nike Air Max 90 arrived in 1990 with a design so considered and so right that three decades later it is still in production, still coveted, still capable of stopping someone in the street who recognises the silhouette from twenty metres away. Tens of millions of people around the world have a relationship with this object that goes beyond function — it carries memories, identities, moments from their lives that the shoe happened to be present for. That is not trivial. That is what beauty does when it lands in the right place.
What is Love? is the Air Max 90 as the artist would make it — pink and purple and unapologetically vivid, customised in the imagination of someone who understands that the greatest tribute you can pay a design is to reimagine it in your own language. Washi tape and Posca markers and spray paint and stickers building a surface that treats the trainer with the same attention and joy that the trainer's original designers brought to it.
Pop art has always understood that the boundary between fine art and the objects people actually love was invented by people who hadn't looked closely enough at the objects. Andy Warhol looked at a soup can. This artist looks at a shoe.
The question the title asks has many answers. This is one of them.
30.5 × 30.5 cm · Acrylic, spray paint, washi tape, Posca markers and stickers on canvas panel · 2021 · One of a kind Framed. Signed on the front and signed, titled and dated on the reverse. Certificate of Authenticity included.