Jack Barrett is pleased to present Knightwatch, Brooklyn-based sculptor Justin Cloud’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a series of ten metal wall-works in custom aluminum frames.

Coming from a lineage of trades workers, such as farmers, mechanics and engineers, Justin Cloud began his professional career as a Ford mechanic and Ball can factory worker in Wyoming. Building on his experience and skilled understanding of metal, Cloud studied and trained himself in various artistic methods of metalwork. To create this series, he employed the ancient techniques of repoussé and chasing, art forms historically used to emboss metal objects, adorning everything from armor and chalices to the Statue of Liberty with ornate designs. To start the process, Cloud heats a slab of molten pitch, or resin, to use as a flexible support on which he can hammer and chisel the metal from the reserve side, shaping the aluminum to create designs in low relief. For Cloud, this technique is akin to alchemy, a magical transmutation of metal–a material renowned for its rigidity and durability–into something malleable and shapeable to one’s will.

Central to Justin Cloud's practice is the exploration of aesthetics and an intrinsic connection between the natural world and craftsmanship. By his account, “when you start manipulating metal, it wants to follow an organic structure.” A sentiment surely shared by Filippo Negroli, famed 16th century Milanese armorer known for his exquisitely embossed combat helmets, decorated with intertwining botanicals, weeds and fantastical myths, and whose work acts a source of inspiration for Cloud’s own practice. Drawing from a wide range of imagery and artistic styles, Cloud finds inspiration in everything from 18th century naturalistic drawings of flora and fauna, 19th century Art Nouveau jewelry design, the modernist paintings of Charles E. Burchfield, Egon Schiele, and Odilon Redon, and even AI generated imagery. Like so many before him, Cloud is compelled to unravel the mysteries of the natural world, welding metal, a hammer and chisels as his instruments of exploration and interpretation.

–Francesca Altamura