WHERE LOVE APPEARS
Notes by Jack Warne
FVTVRIST Magazine // Edited by Anna Somova, Editor-in-Chief, FVTVRIST
11 March 2026
Where love appears,
2026 January 23 – March 28,
2026 Presented at Mai 36 Gallery, Zurich
What follows is not an interview. It is something rarer: an artist thinking aloud, without the mediation of questions and without the performance of answers. Jack Warne moves through his work as the work itself unfolds, through association, accumulation, and reflection, circling a question that cannot be fully resolved.
That question is embedded in the title of the exhibition. Where, not what, not why, where does love appear? Jack Warne approaches this word deliberately. In these reflections, Jack Warne speaks about personal experience, grief, perception, and the technological structures that shape contemporary life. The text refuses any division of the emotional and the intellectual, the private and the political.
Jack Warne, Exhibition view, Courtesy of the artist and Mai36 Galerie
I kept thinking: where does love appear, and how do you name that moment without flattening it into cliché? The title came after a struggle. Titles are supposed to arrive intuitively, but this one needed time, because the exhibition is not a thesis. It is a condition.
I. How the Ordinary Becomes Charged
My work begins with something unremarkable: a photograph I have taken, an image found, a daily object, flowers bought almost without thinking. Then I ask myself: how can the everyday become charged? How can it begin to puncture?
I work through a digital system, software, phone, computer, not to perfect the image, but to injure it gently, to weather it. I create a kind of glass: distorted, aged, imperfect, stained. A surface that refuses clarity. And then the question returns: what changes when you cannot see cleanly? What changes when you do not want to?
The image behind the glass is still there, but it is filtered through time, through abrasion, through a veil.
II. Self Love as Ritual
London was too much. Not only the noise of the city, but the invisible violence of it: cost, speed, the constant sense of being consumed by work. I left every weekend without understanding why, until I did. The move to Cornwall was not just geographic. It was existential.
I realised something I did not want to admit: I had no ritual of self love. No space. No softness. My energy went outward, toward audience, production, survival. So I started with something almost embarrassingly simple: flowers. Every week. Not decoration, a deliberate gesture. A small proof that I could still care for a moment.
And that is where love begins to appear: not as romance, not as a slogan, but as an emergence, a slow return of attention to the self, and then to others.
III. Punctum, What Pierces Us
A text stayed with me: Roland Barthes and the idea that an image can be read in two ways. One is the subject: documentary, rational, descriptive. The other is the punctum: the detail that punctures you. It wounds you in a quiet way.
I keep asking: why does one image leave us untouched, while another enters our body? There is not a neat answer. Perhaps it is personal memory; perhaps it is something shared: childhood, daily life, grief, tenderness. Maybe the punctum does not belong to the image alone. Maybe it is a collision between image and viewer.
So I start with a signal, clear, objective, and then I push and pull the image until it begins to vibrate. Until it becomes less about what is shown and more about what is felt.
Bleu Bells, Courtesy of the artist and Mai36 Galerie
IV. The Unseen Machine
The Romantic period became a mirror. The Romantics left London too, Wales, the Lake District, Cornwall, resisting a culture that treated rationality as the only valid human mode. Their resistance was political, but also emotional: a defense of sensitivity, of nature, of inner life.
I recognise the same pressure now, but with a new cruelty: today’s machine is often unseen. Factories once had smoke. You could point to the cause. Now we live inside infrastructures you cannot locate: phones, feeds, algorithms, invisible systems that shape attention and anxiety.
Is this why it is harder to escape? Because you cannot step away from what you cannot see.
That is why where matters in the title. It is practical, almost scientific: where are you standing? What are you facing? What are you allowing into you?
Jack Warne, Exhibition view, Courtesy of the artist and Mai36 Galerie
V. The Ethics of Staying Still
I trust painting because it does not change. Unlike film, unlike a feed, a painting holds its structure. It does not refresh. It does not accelerate. It stays. That stability matters to me. It is almost ethical.
But I also work with augmented reality, because the contradiction is honest. We live between the analog and the virtual, the physical and the simulated, the ritual and the interface. So the work becomes a balancing act: how do we live with technology without surrendering the human? Not by rejecting it, but by insisting on counter rituals: touch, slowness, imperfection, the grain of a room, the mud, the sea.
The sea is a spiritual threshold for me. Horizon as universe. A place where the body feels porous, where you can imagine your atoms dissolving into something larger. And it carries a question I cannot stop asking: how will future generations find love if the screen is their first landscape? Love might change form, but what happens to love if it loses contact with fallibility, with error, with the imperfect texture of reality?
VI. Eriharr (For Dad)
There is one work in the exhibition that carries the most direct, most personal translation of love: Eriharr (For Dad).
It was radical for me because it was the first painting where I had a clear preconception of what it should look like. Usually I begin with a photograph and let the process reveal itself. But with the plane, I knew. I did not know why, I just did.
My father painted a fighter jet in the 1980s: a Harrier preparing to lift off. A Cold War image: precision, ascent, mastery. He was fascinated by history, and that fascination passed to me. My father died when I was around twenty. And like many people who lose someone, I keep discovering strange ways to reconnect.
Was I revisiting an image, or re entering a relationship? How do you inherit a subject? How do you make it yours without erasing the original love inside it?
When I made prototypes, people responded unexpectedly: my father flew a plane like that, my grandfather. They placed themselves inside the image. The warplane, cold, political, became a vessel for intimacy. That is when it struck me: love does not always appear in soft symbols. Sometimes it appears through what is hard, historical, even violent, because people convert history into inner life, and inner life into meaning.
In the augmented reality layer, I strip the plane back to geometry, to lines, to a reduction toward essence. Not to neutralise it, but to ask again: what remains when the image is taken apart? What remains when memory is processed through form?
The exhibition needed this rupture. If it were only flowers, it could be misread as still life, as atmosphere. The plane, the portrait, the landscape: these works break the surface and insist on tension. Because love, in this exhibition, is not a theme. It is a threshold.
And the question returns, as it always does: where does it appear, where is it gone, how do we recognise it when it arrives?
About Jack Warne
Jack Warne is a British artist and musician living and working in Cornwall. His practice moves across painting, sound composition, and emerging technologies, bringing together photographs from his personal archive with 3D rendering, industrial printing, and custom-built augmented reality. Nothing in Jack Warne’s work is fixed. Each piece operates as a perceptual interface, a surface that holds more than it reveals, containing latent digital and sonic layers that extend beyond the initial act of viewing. Technology in Jack Warne’s practice is not a medium in the conventional sense. It functions as a structural instrument and a method for examining how memory, intimacy, and perception behave under pressure. At the core of this inquiry lies a broader question: what survives mediation? Jack Warne’s work considers whether emotional experience can persist, and even intensify, within increasingly complex technological systems.
