EGN NEWS DESK
In 1949, a younger American artist named Ray Johnson left Black Mountain College close to Asheville, N.C., moved to New York City and commenced to discover his prolix skills, each visible and verbal.
By the mid-Sixties, Johnson (1927-95) had established himself within the downtown avant-garde as a multitasking workaholic: a precursor of Pop, Conceptual and Nineteen Eighties Appropriation artwork, a founding father of mail artwork (a time period he disliked) and a author of narratively eccentric, almost hallucinatory prose.
Most of all he was the creator of muscular noirish collages in black, white and grey that blended collectively pictures of Hollywood stars, male porn and recurring cartoon faces of his personal invention — often labeled with sundry names of his favourite artists and film stars, typically skewed (Veronica Rake).
How did the blossoming of Ray Johnson occur? Some of what got here earlier than has been gathered into “Ray Johnson: Paintings and Collages 1950-66,” a small revelatory exhibition on the Craig F. Starr Gallery, organized by Starr and Frances Beatty, of the Adler/Beatty Gallery, which oversees the Ray Johnson property. This is the primary present dedicated to this era, and it introduces an early Ray Johnson that’s fairly completely different from the one identified for his later gritty samplings of widespread tradition. Any museum could be proud to stage it. Any customer will discover an ideal deal to study how ambition and an virtually brutal work ethic can nurture innate items.
The artist you meet at Starr gallery is sort of the other of his elder. Johnson the Younger has an unfamiliar genius for shade, the lapidarian strategy of a jeweler and a devotion to evocative abstraction.
The 13 works transfer shortly with little or no repetition, however with a connecting thread of obsession. The present opens with summary panel work rendered in scarily skinny strains of radiant shade. They owe an ideal debt to Josef Albers, the painter and theoretician of shade, with whom Johnson studied at Black Mountain; Albers’s spouse, the textile artist Anni Albers; and the couple’s curiosity in pre-Columbian artwork. The dense buildings of “Ladder World” evoke Mayan temple facades; “Calm Center” suggests Andean textiles, in addition to an encyclopedia of geometric abstraction.
Johnson quickly turned to collage, changing his high-quality strains of paint with slim strips of paper razor minimize from squares of shiny journal texts that he layered with shade. He then randomly reconstituted the squares, typically including dots and dashes or skinny washes or shade or sandpapering by means of the layers.
The outcomes of this combination of processes are mysterious and virtually indescribably beautiful. The reassembled blocks name forth little seas wherein fragments of textual content from the magazines float like wreckage, but additionally endpapers, miniaturized carpets and Persian manuscripts. The apotheosis of the approach is the magisterial “Birds,” wherein Johnson stacked a few dozen blocks of various colours and textures, conjuring one other temple or cathedral facade.
Soon, or presumably on the identical time, since he was often obscure about relationship, Johnson developed an much more arduous type of collage. He began portray on, gluing bits of minimize paper to, and sandpapering little tiles of cardboard of various thicknesses, conjuring each bas-relief and the vintage. The tons of of individually labored tiles in “Ice,” from 1966, resemble shards of historic flooring or frescoes laid out for archaeological examine, but additionally a random historical past of summary portray.
The bigger works on this astounding present are among the most intricately obsessive in Twentieth-century artwork, and their making might have endangered Johnson’s eyes, palms and, presumably, his mind. But he was actually forsaking shade, abstraction and art-historical references to make an artwork of his time — from his identification as a homosexual man and the favored tradition surrounding him.
Ray Johnson: Paintings and Collages, 1950-66
Through June 29, Craig F. Starr Gallery, 5 East 73rd Street, Manhattan, 212-570-1739; craigstarr.com.
