Mars Singleton

I Love You More When It's Over

V1 Gallery is pleased to present

I Love You More When It’s Over
A solo exhibition by Mars Singleton
June 12 – August 8, 2026

Opening reception: June 12, 16.00 - 21.00

the true paradises are paradises we have lost.

— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (Vol. 7, 1927)

Life is often a cycle of longing, as desire is sharpened by absence, and as the beauty of a moment often appears clearest once it has slipped away. I Love You More When It’s Over unfolds within this tension, from the fundamental realisation about desire and space: that we often love things most acutely when they're no longer ours to hold. The exhibition lingers in the fond memory of the sun’s warmth, felt when a winter storm’s icy hands touch your shivering body. As the seasons shift, this yearning turns into the desire for air so cold you can taste it, while standing in the rays of a blistering sun that sets the horizon shimmering.

Mars Singleton’s paintings carry the residue of a life left behind — the lessons, injuries, setbacks, setups, fights, and frolics — while overlooking a bright landscape of the present. Though they meditate on the clarity that arrives only after a chapter closes, these paintings aren’t nostalgic; rather, they are shaped by an acknowledgment of passing time and life’s shifting seasons. Singleton’s paintings are memories touched by the rose-coloured fingers of remembrance. These moments, now fixed on wooden panels, in ochre tones of light, aren’t recalled; they’re reenacted, and in that reenactment, they represent a time, place or version of events that may never have existed. In memory, we breathe familiar air anew.

Throughout the exhibition, Singleton centres queer bodies with intimate care. Rendered in brown and black skin tones, these figures’ presence is neither exceptionalised nor dramatized; instead, they’re held with the same sincerity as the landscapes, as a part of the emotional terrain. In this effort, Singleton’s images are not utopian projections but grounded, present realities, affirming queer embodiment within the ordinary.

In Days without Power a person lay on their side, with their back turned to us, in a bed, sleeping or perhaps looking out in the distant landscapes. The lamp of the nightstand functions as a sculpture, purely ornamental, as light and wind flow through the open window, rustling the curtain and setting the scene in bright yellow tones. This image reenacts the time when Singleton moved into a new apartment and had to wait for the power to be turned on — a tough moment but through memory’s filter it becomes an image of serene reminiscence. A moment that feels still and full of calm contemplation. 

Looking at moments passed, examining the emotions felt at the time is frequently tied to nostalgia; a practice that’s often seen as an obscurer of moments, suggesting that golden-toned memory is somehow dishonest about the events in which it was formed. But what if, the reenactment of memory isn’t a folly but a concentration? Distilled by time, the most significant aspect of a moment persists; and as such, distance enables us to see these moments clearly, to love the past more honestly than the present. These paintings aren’t set to nostalgia’s sombre tones, they’re an ontological study of being, and a such they hold the truth that nothing lasts forever and that in the aftermath, we finally understand what we loved.

Mars Singleton (b. 1990) is an American artist whose work has been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH (2025); California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2025); Portland Art Museum, Portland, ME (2025); Mitchell Innes-Nash, NYC (2023); Journal Gallery, NYC (2020, 2022, 2024); TURN Gallery, NYC (2019, 2021); and Medium Tings, NYC (2018). His work is found in the public collections of the San Antonio Museum of Art; Portland Museum of Art; ICA Miami; and the High Museum, Atlanta.

I Love You More When It’s Over is Mars Singleton's first solo exhibition with V1 Gallery.

Text by Adam Kierkegaard