Jean-Paul Mallozzi

My work draws on memories of feeling sexually free with abandon, a freedom that now carries a double-edged weight. When I depict kissing or physical intimacy, it exists in tension: simultaneously charged and cautious, a space of reverence and longing. There is joy in witnessing others move through the world with such openness, and an ache in striving to return to that same freedom in the way I once did.Layered beneath this is the complexity of growing up in a conservative Latino immigrant household navigating the biases, customs, and religious beliefs that shaped and complicated my earliest experiences of self, body, and desire. My practice lives in that charged space between memory and loss, between who I was and who I became.

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Jean-Paul Mallozzi is a contemporary visual artist based in Miami, Florida, whose work focuses on the intersection of memory, intimacy, and the human condition. His practice is deeply rooted in his experiences as a first-generation Latino-American. He was one of 15 artists in South Florida to receive the Cultural Consortium Grant, an alliance of the arts councils of Broward, Martin, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach Counties that grants visual and media artists $15,000, as well as having one of his pieces acquired by the city of Miami's public art collection. In (2025),  his work was included in the Don't Look Now exhibit curated by Barbara Pollack in NYC which included other notable artists such as Marilyn Minter, Shepard Fairey, and Dread Scott. That same year, he was blind juried into New American Paintings by Alexis Assam Regenia A. Perry Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, as well as in (2022) by Amanda Morgan, the Assistant Curator, Exhibitions and Publications, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.