Lester Johnson Jan 8-Feb 2, 1963 Martha Jackson Gallery NYC Exhibition Catalog

Description: Lester Johnson January 8-February 2, 1963 Martha Jackson Gallery New York City Exhibition Catalog 4 Pages OPENING FROM FIVE TO EIGHT TUESDAY, JANUARY 8 through FEBRUARY 2, 1963 Lester Johnson has labored in the toils of an idée fixe for some years. Or perhaps it is an idée force. His preoccupation with the human head is obsessive, eccentric. but not static. It is a dynamic stimulus to his imagination. lohnson is not mereiv representing the human carcass. He is saturating an image with ruminations, material and immaterial, local and cosmic, temporary and timeless. The personages in Johnson's paintings are unlike any others. They inhabit a place that is sealed-off. They belong where they are and where they are is a phantasmic place coniured by the brooding artist. Obviously it is a place where the artist can live, where his thoughts and feelings can expand, and where nothing outside this hermetic realm really matters. Like all recluses, Johnson makes of his habitation a cache of secrets. He keeps wandering within its confines, astonished at how much he discovers. For the spectator it may seem a very limited retreat, but for the artist it is a universe. You enter this place on his terms or nor at all. For me it is the closedness, the cryptic darkness that makes Johnson's paintings. Sometimes they are not meant to be "seen" at all, but only to serve as cues to the nature of his reverie. Even at their most explicit, Johnson's canvases are never sign-posts. He never comments on the figures. never strives to characterize them or set them off from one another. They are Everyman. On his magic slate he sees the same image again and again, altered only by degree of light and nuance of mood. Like the naturalist who renders a rock formation a thousand times (and in the 18th century the rock was thought to be alive), noting minute variations, Johnson studies posture, profile, displacement of air and light, remarking that the slightest variation in atmosphere affects the whole. In one sense his paintings are abstractions whose content is wonder. In another sense they are animistic invocations. The reason Johnson is concerned with the head is, as he has said, because he loves the form. rhythm and logic in a face, the aliveness of flesh. the sparkle in man's eve. His love finds its expression in terms of the dense matter of paint--thick, tactile, organic, reminiscent of its origins in the earth. In a mysterious transference, Johnson expresses the vitality of man by revealing the vitality of matter. Stylistically Johnson belongs to the younger abstract expressionist generation. His first exhibition that I saw in 1951 comprised thickly painted abstractions intended to startle in their harsh juxtapositions of orange and black form, their heavy-handed palette knife technique. In keeping with a moment of audacity in the western world, when paint itself appeared independently efficacious. and the hand of the artist, as it groped and grappled with tacky matter, was considered invaluable for its idiosyn-cracy alone, Johnson's style was rooted in expressionIsm. Yet like many creators, Johnson quarreled inwardly with his penchant and eventually modified his style. He sought an equilibrium that could only be established if he focused on something in space first a potted plant, then a room, then the human inhabitant of this cornered space Giacometti probably influenced him, and was probably the only artist with whom Johnson had anything in common. Johnson's deep commitment, his concern with the human condition, is a concern with reflection. So is Giacometti's. The unreflected life is not worth living, etc. Johnson's reflection is on relationships, or the lack of them, and cannot be paraphrased. It sits in his work (cont'd) The equilibrium within his compositions derives largely from Johnson's insistence on unified light. His light usually cold, piercing gray but sometimes a sulphurously soft yellow or dim green-enfolds man, plant, hat and room. It is used at times as a foil. much as Poe used creeping dritts of artificial light to evoke gloom. Or. it is used as a synonym for space itself-air thickened by breathing, smoke, and life itself_-continuous and enveloping. The bodies held in this air are compact, often painted dark blue, green or black. They usually face the spectator: frontal visions as commanding as Egyptian black granite statues. Their features are generalized, their eyes usually deep-set. In the best of Johnson's compositions the profile of the head is succinct, unbroken, emphasiz. ing the negative-positive spaces between which become cello and vase shapes and carry the rhythms of the figure beyond their representational function. Johnson often Interpolates horizonta stresses pot within the figure and behind it in order to close to the chamber-like space and suggest the finality of man's situation or at any rate, of Johnson's man's situation. The figure alone is relatively unimportant. Johnson's urge to abstraction is too pressing for that. What he sees from up close and what he renders is the strangeness of man in the light of his special environment. Accordingly the variations in matter itself are significant. Even the most monochromatic of Johnson's paintings--those in which the Matisse convention of overall environment (the Red Room) is given a new twist-the life of the paint is as vital, busy, and complex as cells beneath the microscopic lens. He piles on the paint, scores it with the handle of his brush, scrapes and begins again, overpaints orange with green-black, makes deep troughs with a stiff brush, makes a mass of soupy greens or bronzed blacks, melts the edges of some strokes, even writes words wit the same swing that he brings to the brush-form. in some instances what appears to be an inert solid black is at second glance a mass of con-trasts. Johnson paints heavy surfaces and often allows an almost invisible rain of thin black to trickle down the tough skin. The veins, cells, torrents and cataclysms in the life of his paint are legion. Johnson's apparitions are nowhere as spellbinding as they are in recent paintings, particularly one he calls Broadway Crowd Scene. With the intensity of a late 19th-century Symbolist, Johnson paints three figures in asymmetrical relationship, embraced by a singularly cold atmosphere. They are hatted. The eve takes in one hat, then another, then an interval with no hat. then the third. Already there is an uncanny rhythm. Johnson also writes-in, with a looping hand, the word "blue," and because the word begins in the gray light, rides over the figure and into the light again, blue instantly qualifies the blackness of the image and the silverness of the light: Still another rhythm. Above, there is a pattern of walking feet, almost caricatured but not quite, treading out the rhythms of the city day, a Joycean bloomsday, doomsday day. Proust said of Rembrandt that the light that bathes his portraits and his pictures is in some way the very light of his thought, the kind of personal light in which we view things when we are thinking for ourselves. The oblique light that is imprisoned in Johnson's paintings is similarly the very light of his brooding thought. DORE ASHTON Published by Arts & Architecture January 1963

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