(Heart Collage)
Anonymous
Found 01/2016, Savers (North Loop and Burnet)

The anonymous artist of (Heart Collage) views love through a variety of lenses: a sparkling array of tiny hearts suggesting limitless abundance; a barely discernible outline suggesting, perhaps, the difficulty of perceiving love when it is present; a ghostly, fading heart, perhaps an echo of a long-ago love; a frightening abstraction that in context suggests a biological heart; a strong purple and pink design at once the classic “Valentine” heart but as well echoing the primary organ of circulation, which appears to be a stamp or woodcut-type print.

The central heart is perhaps the most fascinating, a complex series of lines and design that is, significantly, a received design, not one applied directly to the paper with a brush. The artist seems to suggest that love cannot exist on its own, but is the product of two—or perhaps many—elements coming together.

At the base of the canvas, there is the suggestion of one more design, which doesn’t seem to mesh with the rest of the image. Broken and incomplete, it may be a truncated valentine’s heart, and within the context of the picture couldn’t be anything else. Is this a broken heart, or an embryonic heart, something that is working toward completion?