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| Mitchell Johnson and H.S.H. at Villa Les Camelias July 3, 2024 Villa Les Camelias had a tenth anniversary celebration July 3, 2024 in Cap d'Ail, France, and in attendance was H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco. Mitchell Johnson and Prince Albert did a color changing exercise during the visit. The exhibition "La Revelation de Meyreuil" is on view at Musee Villa Les Camelias through September 29, 2024. |
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| "Meyreuil Floor Still Life," 1991 16x24 inches oil/canvas (©2024 Mitchell Johnson) |
Musée de la Villa les Camélias in Cap d’Ail, France, presents La révélation de Meyreuil, an exhibition of 50 small paintings by Bay Area artist Mitchell Johnson, on view from May 17 through September 29, 2024. Spanning four decades, the show explores the relationship between Johnson’s early work from Europe with recent paintings from California, New England, and New York.
In 1989, at the age of 25, Mitchell Johnson left New York for his first trip to Europe — a voyage that would launch a lifetime of interaction with color. Landing in Gotland, Sweden, and making his way south to Meyreuil, France, he was drawn to and overwhelmed by the new landscapes and unfamiliar colors and patterns. Driven by a powerful instinct to translate what he saw into paintings, he returned again and again to work on location and to study in museums.
Donald Kuspit on Johnson’s early Meyreuil work:
But where Cezanne fetishized Mont St. Victoire, implicitly a symbol of his delusion of grandeur— climbing and conquering it with his art, he became a Moses giving new commandments about making art — Johnson is down to earth, indeed, in the streets of Meyreuil and the countryside around it. He allows the objects he finds there their everyday autonomy even as he finds aesthetic value in them, rather than reduces them to anonymous abstract form as Cezanne tends to do. ‘Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone,’ he wrote to Emile Bernard, that is, emphasize and extract its geometry — make it self-evident. Is the difficulty, effort of doing that — of abstracting the geometrical essence of a concrete thing — the reason for what Picasso called ‘Cezanne’s anxiety?’ In sharp contrast, Johnson’s paintings convey what I would call the serenity of self-possession — the calm of mature self-certainty. Where Cezanne was a proto-modernist, making representational works that were implicitly abstract, Johnson is a post-modernist, making abstract works that are implicitly — often explicitly — representational. He is a master of both modes, seamlessly integrating them to memorable effect, for memory at its most insistent is an abstract representation — an aesthetic epiphany.
La révélation de Meyreuil is on view May 17–September 29, 2024, at Musée de la Villa les Camélias in Cap d’Ail, France.
For more information, visit mitchelljohnson.com and follow him on Instagram at @mitchell_johnson_artist.
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| "Luxembourg," 2022 16x16 inches oil/canvas This painting, "Luxembourg," 2022, appears in both the January 15, 2024 issue of the New Yorker and the February issue of Artforum Magazine. If you click on the image above you'll see a higher quality photo that you can zoom in on to see the paint, the surface. This little kiosk in the Luxembourg garden has intrigued me for years but I only recently made a few paintings of it. When I first went to France in 1989 I was in Paris briefly and I would go for very long runs that often went through the Luxembourg and I'm pretty sure that's the first time I saw this kiosk. Like all of my paintings, this isn't so much a record of what was there as it is a jumping off point for some shapes and colors that I'm assembling that feel mysterious, baffling, complex. The chair could be any color, any location - whatever the painting needs. The way that the painting is built, the touch of the paint application are both very important and have evolved over 40 years. Each are impossible to consciously strategize or control. The painting may not work and it might get destroyed. Time will tell. I talk about my painting process at length in various interviews. See Savvy Painter, Painting Perceptions, Huffington Post, I Like Your Work Podcast, Studio Break Podcast. Donald Kuspit has written a lot about my work and you can read two of his essays at Whitehot Magazine. There are two exhibits in 2024: January-February, 2024 Selected Work 1988-2024 Flea Street Menlo Park May 17-September 29, 2024 La révélation de Meyreuil, an exhibition of 50 small paintings Musée de la Villa les Camélias in Cap d’Ail, France  |
Save the date, May 17, 2024 is the opening of the retrospective exhibit, "La révélation de Meyreuil",
at Musée de la Villa les Camélias, Cap d'Ail, France. The exhibit runs May 17-September 29, 2024. |
| "Meyreuil Fiat," 1989 6x12 inches oil/panel |
