Etichette
by John Mendelsohn, New York Art Critic

     We ask artists to be our eyes, to see the world anew, both in its disasters and its delights. J. J. L’Heureux has in recent years perceived an abiding joy in the most modest of places: the wrappings and labels of cheese and fruit. With them she has created an ongoing series of collages and prints, whose collective title is “Etichette,” the Italian word for label.
     The labels, which the artists has found while traveling in Italy, have an inherent charm and graphic strength. L’Heureux collages the illustrated, seal-like logos and expanses of printed or white wrapping paper on grounds of vivid color. There is a buoyant, off-kilter energy to L’Heureux’s arrangements, with labels multiplying and dispersing like balloons across skies of yellow, green, or red.
     The wrapping paper is often in large blocks, riven by openings, or in irregular shards. The rule seems to be that even when there is a mandala-like center, nothing is uninterrupted or complete. Rather, we glimpse a gathering of fragments that have come to the artists torn or folded, or have survived a process of culling and cutting.
     L’Heureux creates with these elements a poetry both lyrical and high-spirited, not only from what has been found, but also from what has been lost. The lightness of the printed matter and of the layered compositions themselves give the impression that they have simply floated into place. The sewn stitches that the artist uses seem to be just temporarily holding them down.
     The stitches seem, as well, to be a kind of repair, as if the artist were sewing back into place a kind of harmony, that otherwise we might have missed. She holds the fugitive souvenirs together just long enough for us to see that nearby a delight in life is ready for us to find, too.

Per Traduzione All'Italiano
by Peter Frank, Los Angeles Art Critic

     J. J. L’Heureux’s interest in the labels found on northern Italian cheeses is motivated basically by their intricacy, heraldry, and geographic and gustatory particularity. Certainly, they function in her work also as souvenirs of L’Heureux’s trips to Italy (although her artistic intervention saves them from mere fetishistic display or collector’s hierarchic arrangement). She discovered that these labels for gorgonzola, bel paese, and other kinds of Italian cheese were an endangered species, disappearing in the face of political and economic standardization and globalization, only well after she had begun her extended series, when she returned to the country to find that several of the brands had disappeared in her absence. But her visual engagement with these Etichette reinforces the fact that they are aesthetic objects in their own right. L’Heureux’s incorporation of the labels, by her own admission, does not confer artistic status on them, but exploits their inherent attractiveness (and, of course, their association with one of the world’s – especially the art world’s – staple foods). But, as with Andy Warhol’s exaltation of the Campbell’s soup can, it takes an artist to show us the art in the everyday, to get us to see through the eyes of a connoisseur, not (just) those of a consumer.
     L’Heureux’s art is generally based in and responsive to her life experience, whether capturing the energy and anxiety of earthquakes or the loss of a family member. These sources are not readily apparent, but are subsumed into the abstract whole, where they take over the artwork’s DNA and convert it into a purely visual experience – inflected, however, by the sensations of fear or loss or exultation, sensations which are all that are left after L’Heureux “boils down” her experiences into colors, forms, and found images. In the Etichette, with the sources left undisguised and so liberally used, the referent aspect(s) of the work cannot be ignored. But, as in the work of Kurt Schwitters, Robert Motherwell, and other illustrious predecessors of L’Heureux’s expansive, painterly, and ultimately formal method, her collages successfully resist narrative interpretation, and, in their very attractiveness – their giddy beauty, their delight in color, their loose, open, but clearly reasoned and controlled composition – ambush the eye before the brain can start reading.