Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. I know you like to stroll through galleries sipping champagne and pretending to understand what you’re looking at. But today, we’re going to talk about someone who truly deserves your attention: John Haverty.
This native of Boston, born in 1986 and winner of the prestigious Luxembourg Art Prize in 2016, is not your standard artist painting pretty landscapes to decorate your bourgeois apartment. No. Haverty is a creator of fascinating worlds, an explorer of the darkest corners of our society, armed not with a machete but with a ballpoint pen and watercolors.
Haverty’s work is a precarious balance between beauty and repulsion. Using traditional techniques like watercolor and ballpoint pen on paper, he creates fantastic worlds populated by hybrid creatures that seem to emerge from the collective nightmares of our time. His dense, colorful compositions, overflowing with tiny details, demand sustained attention. Each square centimeter tells a different story, like a series of interconnected visual mini-novels.
What truly sets Haverty apart is his creation method. As a pilot for American Airlines, he often works in airport lounges and hotel rooms. This nomadic existence has led him to develop a unique approach: he cuts out his drawings and glues them onto vinyl to create evolving collages that can be rearranged infinitely. His piece “Gangrene” is literally an artistic infection that spreads and devours the space around it.
The title “Gangrene” is not chosen lightly. Like the infection that eats away at flesh if left untreated, Haverty shows us a society eaten away by overpopulation, overconsumption, pollution, and wars. He reminds us that if we leave these problems unchecked, they will inevitably destroy us. It’s a visual warning, a cry of alarm disguised as a feast for the eyes.
This apocalyptic vision is not without reminding us of the paintings of Jérôme Bosch, one of the artists who influences Haverty. But where Bosch was obsessed with sin and damnation in a medieval religious context, Haverty transposes these concerns to our contemporary era and its specific anxieties: globalization, human impact on the environment, political chaos.
The graphic density of his works relates to horror vacui, the fear of emptiness that drives us to fill every available space. This visual approach is particularly relevant in our era of information overload, where our brains are constantly bombarded with stimuli. Haverty gives us no visual respite, no space to breathe. He forces us to absorb everything, just as we are forced to absorb the constant stream of alarming information in our daily media.
Let’s take a moment to examine his creative process. “I work best by letting my subconscious wander and manifest freely,” he explains. “The pens serve as brushes illustrating my thought process. The results are often ambiguous narratives that are familiar but greatly exaggerated [1]“. This spontaneous and direct method produces works that seem both planned and chaotic, as if they had evolved organically rather than being consciously constructed.
The satirical aspect of his work is essential to understanding its scope. Haverty is not just a fantastic illustrator creating imaginary worlds for our aesthetic pleasure. He uses these worlds as a distorted mirror that reflects our own reality. His visual exaggerations help to construct “a wonderland radiating paranoia,” as he himself describes it.
What particularly strikes me about his collages is their temporal aspect. Each section is a “road painting,” born in a different environment and capturing a specific moment. The whole forms a kind of visual journal, a catalog of constantly evolving thoughts. This diachronic dimension adds an additional depth to his work: we are not just looking at a fixed image, but an accumulation of experiences and reflections.
Haverty fits into a tradition of artists who use art as a tool for social critique. But he does so with undeniable freshness and originality. His work reminds us strangely of the engravings of Francisco de Goya, particularly his series “Los Caprichos”. Like Goya, Haverty uses exaggeration and absurdity to expose society’s folly. But while Goya worked in black and white, Haverty drowns us in a deluge of bright colors.
These parallels with Goya are not coincidental. Both artists share a fundamental concern for the excesses and absurdities of their respective eras. Goya’s “Caprichos,” with their famous engraving “The sleep of reason produces monsters,” find an echo in Haverty’s work. His fantastic creatures also seem born from a collective sleep of reason, from a society that has ceased to be vigilant against the dangers that threaten it.
The political dimension of Haverty’s work is particularly striking in our era of extreme polarization. His works “cast a critical eye on the slippery slope down which we, as a society, are comfortably sliding [2]“. He asks the question: how far is too far? At what point will the problems we ignore become insurmountable?
It is precisely this question that gives his work a particular urgency. In an increasingly fragmented attention culture, where systemic problems are drowned out in a flood of trivial information, Haverty uses visual overload as a strategy to capture and hold our attention. He understands that in our hyperconnected world, attention has become a rare and precious commodity.
This strategy is not without recalling Herbert Marcuse’s theories on “repressive desublimation,” the process by which dominant culture absorbs and neutralizes critique by turning it into entertainment. Haverty seems aware of this trap and skillfully avoids it. His works are undeniably aesthetically seductive, but this beauty serves to draw us into a confrontation with disturbing truths.
Marcuse, a central figure of the Frankfurt School, proposed that true art must maintain a critical distance from the society it critiques. This distancing allows art to preserve its utopian potential, its ability to imagine alternatives to the status quo. Haverty’s work perfectly embodies this productive tension: it shows us our world, but transformed by an imagination that refuses the constraints of conventional “realism.”
In his essay “The Aesthetic Dimension,” Marcuse writes that authentic art “breaks with dominant consciousness, revolutionizes experience [3]“. Haverty’s collages operate precisely this rupture. They tear us away from our habitual perception of the world and force us to see it from a new and troubling angle. This function of art is particularly important in an era where reality itself seems increasingly absurd and irrational.
Marcuse saw in art a refuge for “negativity,” for the refusal to accommodate an unjust world. Haverty’s works embody this negativity, not in a nihilistic sense, but as a form of critical resistance. They say “no” to the status quo, refuse to accept as normal what is fundamentally pathological in our social organization and our relationship to the environment.
This political dimension is inseparable from the very form that his art takes. The choice of collage as the main medium is not insignificant. Collage, with its juxtaposition of disparate elements forced into a new unity, reflects the fragmented nature of our contemporary experience. It also allows for a form of organic growth that mimics the cancerous development of the social problems that Haverty seeks to expose.
The evolving aspect of his works is particularly significant. “Gangrene” is never truly finished; it continues to grow, to spread, to devour more space. This processual quality resonates with the Marcusean notion that true art must resist closure, finality, keep open the possibility of a different future. Haverty’s works are in perpetual becoming, just like our social reality is constantly in flux.
Another interesting aspect of Haverty’s work is its relationship to time and space. Created largely in airports and hotels, his works are literally produced in these “non-places” that anthropologist Marc Augé defines as spaces of transit, characterized by solitude and similarity. These identity-less spaces paradoxically become the anchor points of a nomadic creativity that transcends geographical borders.
This nomadic dimension is reflected in the very content of his works, which address global rather than local problems. Haverty is a truly cosmopolitan artist, not in the elitist sense of the term, but as someone who perceives the world as an interconnected system where local actions have global consequences.
Let’s now return to the visual specificity of his work. His use of color is particularly remarkable. Unlike many artists who deal with dark subjects in a dark palette, Haverty employs bright and saturated colors. This contrast between troubling content and visual brilliance creates a productive tension that amplifies the impact of his works. It’s as if the gangrene he represents were paradoxically full of life, teeming with activity even as it signals death.
This approach reminds me of the films of Wes Anderson, with their careful and colorful aesthetics that often serve as a counterpoint to themes of melancholy, loss, and social misfit. Like Anderson, Haverty understands that beauty can be a powerful vehicle for disturbing truths. Aesthetic seduction draws us into a space where we are more likely to confront what we would prefer to ignore.
The comparison to cinema is not coincidental. Haverty’s works have an undeniable cinematic quality. His vast collages invite the gaze to move, to follow micro-narratives, to discover unexpected connections between different sections. Like a director, he guides our attention through a complex visual landscape, using composition to create moments of tension and release.
This narrative dimension is fundamental in his work. Despite the apparent fragmentation, there is an underlying coherence, a thread that connects the disparate elements. It is not a linear narration, but rather a network of associations and resonances that invites the viewer to construct their own interpretative path.
This interpretative openness is one of the great strengths of his art. Haverty does not impose a single reading of his works. He creates a space for reflection where our own concerns and perspectives can engage with his vision. It is an art that actively engages us rather than reducing us to passive consumers.
This participatory quality is particularly valuable in our era of accelerated cultural consumption. In a world where art is often reduced to Instagram images consumed in a few seconds before being swiped away, Haverty’s work demands and rewards prolonged engagement. You cannot “consume” one of his works in a quick glance; it requires that you spend time, explore its details, let yourself be absorbed by its universe.
In this sense, his work represents a form of resistance to contemporary cultural acceleration. In his book “Acceleration,” sociologist Hartmut Rosa analyzes how our relationship to time has been fundamentally transformed by late modernity, creating a perpetual feeling of lack of time [4]. Haverty’s art invites us to slow down, to take the time necessary for true contemplation.
Rosa suggests that the constant acceleration of our pace of life leads to a form of alienation, a loss of meaningful connection with the world. Haverty’s works, with their density of detail that requires sustained attention, create what Rosa would call a moment of “resonance,” an experience where we establish a deeper and more authentic relationship with our environment.
This ability to create moments of resonance in a world characterized by alienation and disconnection is one of the most important functions of contemporary art. Haverty’s work offers us not only a social critique but also an alternative space where we can slow down, contemplate, and perhaps rediscover a more meaningful engagement with the world.
It is interesting to note that Haverty himself lives in this tension between acceleration and contemplation. His dual life as an American Airlines employee and artist embodies this modern contradiction. On one hand, he participates in one of the most emblematic industries of the spatio-temporal compression that characterizes globalization. On the other, he creates works that demand precisely the kind of slow and sustained attention that this compression tends to erode.
This productive tension informs his entire oeuvre. His collages are simultaneously products of globalization (created in airports and hotels around the world) and critical commentaries on its consequences. They embody the central contradiction of our era: we are both the beneficiaries and the victims of the forces we have unleashed.
The fact that Haverty uses traditional media like watercolor and ballpoint pen rather than digital techniques is also significant. In an increasingly virtual world, there is something fundamentally tactile and physical about his creative process. This rooted materiality forms an interesting counterpoint to the fluidity and ephemerality of the digital images that dominate our daily visual landscape.
This preference for traditional media is not merely artistic conservatism. It rather reflects an acute awareness of the specific qualities that these media offer. Watercolor, with its fluidity and relative unpredictability, allows for a form of dialogue between the artist’s intention and the material’s properties. The ballpoint pen, a humble tool of the everyday, becomes in his hands a precision instrument capable of creating microscopic details.
This alchemy of the banal, this ability to transform ordinary materials into extraordinary visions, is at the heart of Haverty’s practice. It testifies to an inventiveness that refuses to be constrained by the apparent limits of its tools. It is a lesson that we would do well to apply to our own relationship with a world that often seems to impose its constraints on us as fatalities.
John Haverty’s work invites us to a form of courageous lucidity. It asks us to confront the monstrosities that we have collectively created, not to plunge us into despair, but to remind us of our capacity for action. His works show us that even in the face of horror, we retain our capacity for wonder. This is perhaps Haverty’s greatest achievement: creating an art that fully acknowledges the gravity of our situation while reaffirming the value of imagination as a force of resistance and transformation. In a world where imagination is increasingly colonized by market forces, this reaffirmation is not only aesthetically powerful but also politically necessary.
So the next time you see a work by John Haverty, take the time to truly immerse yourself in it. Let yourself be disoriented, troubled, perhaps even disturbed by his fantastic worlds. For it is precisely in this disorientation, in this disruption of our habitual perceptions, that the possibility of an awakening, of an awareness that could be the first step towards a more lucid and responsible relationship with our world in crisis, resides.
- Haverty, John. “Artist Statement”, New American Paintings, MFA Annual, Issue #117, 2015.
- Haverty, John. “Horror Vacui”, New American Paintings, 2015.
- Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, Beacon Press, 1978.
- Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, Columbia University Press, 2013.
