Ed Johnson is a painter who does not skimp. The last time the public heard from his studio was in 2017, when he exhibited at the MiM gallery in Los Angeles. Johnson’s output is sparse, which could be one of the reasons he shows so infrequently, despite working all the time. All of this can be put together at a glance: his paintings are obviously the product of intensive reflection. They are meticulously made, but far from fussy; this impression reinforced by the apparently casual aspect of what they present in terms of content. Johnson’s starting point is always a more or less banal photograph, a snapshot that would strike anyone as random, even a miss, if not translated into painting with such extraordinary precision. This attention is equally divided between what the image represents and what it is in itself as a technical construction. On the side of the viewer, a reciprocal oscillation occurs: the represented image appears both as a sight and as a thing in the sight. So what kind of thing is a photograph once it enters a painting? This is not a new question, it is at the heart of the discourse around photorealism. Yet Johnson achieves this in a way that never ceases to surprise and disturb.
First, a pronounced time lag sets in between the photographic immediacy of the work and the deliberate pictorial process that unfolds over months, often years. In a room like Sugar Creek, 2021, which is based on an overexposed photograph of an overlooked landscape, the viewer can acutely feel how the source image has been bored and stripped. Each grain or pixel in its raster is processed individually; a vast array of tiny, independent, and often brightly colored – sometimes fluorescent – markings imbue the whole scene with an air of compact exuberance that is entirely at odds with the first impression of its washed-out inertia. On closer inspection, these tiny gestures are found to be in harmony with the different things they also serve to represent, becoming languid in relation to the eponymous stream that crosses the composition in a slight diagonal, then more abrupt and rigid for the bad ones. herbs. that grow for no reason on each side. In this Johnson would seem to operate like any painter, except that these marks, executed on a microscopic scale with decidedly non-Expressionist precision, rotate like a sign, a miniature typography. Moreover, the echo between the pictorial form and the imaged content is in no way stereotyped. What caught the eye passing from one painting to another, it is the formal inventiveness of the gestural marks of Johnson, which always turn to the hallucinatory. the awesome Untitled (California), 2021, is a good example. This view of a suburban lawn, with a house barely visible in the background, is marred by enormous lens flare; yet the loss of information that normally occurs when pointing your camera at the sun instead becomes an opportunity for fervent Byzantine elaboration here. Emanating from a white void are countless, restless brushstrokes of every color, a lysergic maelstrom bubbling with ghosts, luminous and sinister in equal measure.
The uninterrupted concentration to which these works testify quickly becomes disturbing. What happened here, one might ask? car fire, 2021, a small nocturnal painting, features an oblique view of a burning automobile on an otherwise perfectly unremarkable neighborhood street. Yet even in what was the show’s only example of a dramatic scene, one couldn’t help but pull away from the action only to once again get lost in a thicket of paint. After all, we face all sorts of atrocities daily on our image feeds without batting an eyelid. The real event, here and elsewhere, is the one that begins in the studio: looking at photographs, painting photographs, then looking again, until something begins that has very little to do with photography. , and which perhaps even has nothing to do with the visible world. appear.
