This painting by Manuel Mathieu evokes humanity’s animal nature. The JJ referenced by the title is Haitian animalist painter Jasmin Joseph (1923-2005). Joseph told a story of being a child who shot at birds with a slingshot before coming to comprehend the true beauty of animals. The more he matured as an artist the more he age to feel that if a painting did not include a depiction of an animal it was not complete. He painted people with animal features, and also depicted animals wearing human clothes or engaged in human activities. It is common for animals to appear in paintings by Indigenous Haitian artists, often presented in the context of rural or agrarian settings. Joseph’s paintings intermingle depictions of humans and animals in both the natural and the built worlds. Their presence in the paintings can encompass folkloric, symbolic, as well as aesthetic functions. In JJ, Mathieu takes the subject of humanity’s animal nature into the realm of the abstract, using energy, color, and emotion to express the ways we are connected to nature rather than separate from it. “That painting gives me that feeling of not being able to dissociate the animal from the human side in us,” Mathieu says.