Biography

Justin Edward Menendez (b. 1981, Tampa, Florida) is an American artist working in painting and photography. Based in Florida, he has developed his practice since 2020. The work treats visual pleasure as the way into an image, then asks what happens to meaning when a painted mark is seen through a lens.

Each piece begins as an abstract painting made to be taken apart. Menendez photographs the surface and reworks it through framing, exposure, color, and scale until a second image appears that the original marks did not intend. That discovered picture is printed in archival pigment on aluminum and finished with hand-applied acrylic, so the object reads as a painting from across a room and as a photograph up close. He calls this process Abstract Deconstructionism. The finished works are unique mixed-media objects: saturated, bluntly cropped, and built for repeated looking.

Menendez is self-taught as a visual artist and holds a BA in Cultural Theory from the University of Florida (2003). He has presented a solo exhibition at 621 Gallery, Tallahassee, and group exhibitions with Vedica Art Studios in Paris and Mumbai. In 2026,  he showed work from a self-organized mobile gallery in Chelsea, New York. His work is held in private collections in the United States and abroad.

Artist Statement

My practice investigates the limits of ordinary perception. I begin with abstract painted marks, then use the camera and digital tools to disrupt the obvious reading of those marks—searching for relationships, forms, and orientations that are not immediately apparent. What appears chaotic from one vantage can reveal unexpected harmony and resonance from another.

When an image achieves a visual intensity that compels me to return to it for sustained looking, I materialize it as a unique physical artwork: an archival pigment print on aluminum finished with heavy, hand-applied acrylic impasto  pulling a weightless digital discovery back into tangible form.  The finished work suspends the viewers gaze in tension between the flatness of the aluminum and the physical presence of paint.  In a culture of disposable images, these "painted screens" require physical presence and reward repeated viewing.