'Ducks on the Pond' summons a placid image of nature: a pastoral scene with still water. The phrase also refers to a baseball term describing runners on base, creating a potential scoring opportunity. Will these runners be brought home, or will they be left stranded? The outcome remains undetermined.
Many of the paintings in Johanson’s fourth solo exhibition at Monte Clark, as in previous exhibitions, present fragmented imagery and potential figurative narratives that allow for slippages in the reading of forms. Utilizing pours of fluid paint, gestural brushwork, and blotting, Johanson employs processes that cede control to the materials and open space for the discovery of unexpected compositions and imagery.
'Ducks on the Pond' includes examples from a recent body of work which mark a departure in the artist’s practice. Here he uses photo references to produce composite images, often including architectural structures like columns, archways, and staircases. These structures, rendered using principles of repeatable linear perspective systems, are contrasted against fluid pours of paint and abstraction.
Two works in the exhibition depict opposing baseball teams in the throes of a bench-clearing brawl set in a landscape of monumental neoclassical architecture. These absurdist arrangements could allude to battling ideological teams. The setting of Washington D.C with the Capitol building and Lincoln memorial recalls depictions of classical architecture in Renaissance painting as do the compositions of numerous figures. In the painting School Floor, a quotation of the tiled ground from Rapheal’s The School of Athens is partially obscured with abstract applications of paint. The gridded perspective is contrasted with fluid and formless areas of paint applied while the canvas was laid horizontally on the studio floor. Slight tilts allowed the paint to flow and leave a trace of its fluid state. This work oscillates between its base material, of oil paint mixed with solvent applied with brushes on a flat surface, to a more ethereal depiction of what might be the cosmos with flowing gas and dust speckled with starlight.
Many of Johanson’s works are peopled with figures that are not quite formed; they seem retrieved from a dream or murky memory. Even in the work Hunters, based on a photo taken by the artist’s father in the 1970s, the characters refuse to fully resolve or become concrete. The paintings in Ducks on the Pond swing back and forth between material and depiction, chance and intention, organization and disruption. They exploit all of these potentials without ever resolving to a fixed outcome.
Opening reception:
Saturday, August 23, noon to 5pm