Initially ignoring the fact that the gallery is filled with a mixture of abstract and representational paintings, Mitchell Johnson's work evokes an orchestra or color. The spectator's experience automatically (if unknowingly) mimics the artist's working process, which is to engage with multiple paintings at once--the jade green of a shadowed awn in one canvas reappears in an adjacent nonrepresentational one. While the landscapes evidence his time spent in Europe as well as in San Francisco (where he moved in 1990), they are snapshots of the artist's experience of these sites and not necessarily ours.
The painterly Pop quality of his work may be reminiscent of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, but as the title of the exhibit suggests, Johnson is all about color theory. Most of the abstract paintings are impressively large, consisting of horizontal and vertical rectangles (usually parallel to the canvas edges) as well as the occasional homage to the loser Albers square.
Each canvas obeys its own system. While a color may be repeated, neighboring hues will either intensify or mute it, reminding the viewer of the relativity of color. Of the large non-representational works. Biscuit (2009-2012) offers the brightest hues; yet, rather than competing with one another, the colors assert themselves one at a time, like parts of a symphony. Sometimes layered, but never simulating spatial depth, a few quadrilaterals are literally textured (evincing Johnson's tendency to use a palette knife) while others are just optically so. For example, a translucent white over a red shave does nor exclusively appear as layered, but rather, as a textured white surface. Both colors co-exist on the surface, rather than subordinating one to the other.
That Johnson is truly a formalist is remarkably evident in his approach to landscape and figurative works. In North Truro (Whiteline), 2008, there are multiple houses receding towards a horizon, but once again, it seems subservient to his use of color as form. The sun-drenched green lawn, thrusts itself forward to compete with the blue rectangle on the left as if sharing the same plane. There is a constant shift of perspective within the scene, mirroring our shift between viewing the painting as representational and then as abstract. Johnson seems far more concerned with the sincerity of painting as painting which Is always already a fictive space.
-REBECCA WELLER
