From January 10 by February 15, Flea Road Restaurant in Menlo Park, California, is exhibiting the color- and shape-driven work of Bay Space artist Mitchell Johnson. Titled Work from Maine, Italy, Newfoundland, and San Francisco, the present options current work that proceed the artist’s exploration of coloration, notion, familiarity, and scale. Whether or not by the inclusion of bridges, icebergs, lifeguard chairs, skyscrapers, or iconic views, Johnson straddles illustration and abstraction to touch upon the act of seeing and reveal his love of artwork historical past.
In 2014, Stanford artwork historian Alexander Nemerov wrote an essay, “Inheritor of Theirs: Mitchell Johnson and Fairfield Porter,” for the monograph Shade as Content material. His two opening paragraphs:
“A delightful factor about Mitchell Johnson’s work is how they counsel different artists akin to Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Giorgio Morandi, and Josef Albers. The references are pleasing as a result of they don’t come throughout as superficial indicators of “affect” any greater than as melodramatic indications of heroic inventive battle. Johnson is neither making a superficial pastiche nor waging an epic battle to win a mode of his personal. Each these artwork historic tales make little sense when taking a look at his artwork.
As a substitute his work are achieved—that phrase, “achieved,” indicating a quiet and intense transit by the work of those different artists. That transit is a response and a correspondence between him and them, a felt connection, that leaves us outward indicators of affinity, positive, but in addition a extra elusive sense that Johnson is aware of these artists from the within. And if that’s the case, then what is enjoyable about Johnson’s artwork is extra precisely the presence of Bonnard and firm, for any achieved artwork akin to Johnson’s will carry inside itself, as indicators of its seriousness, not simply references to earlier artists however one thing intrinsic or important to their photos. What is enjoyable, then, is that one thing important would seem to dwell on, previous these earlier painters’ long-ago deaths, within the artwork of this inheritor of theirs working in our personal time. One such artist residing in Johnson’s work is one other of his acknowledged masters, Fairfield Porter.”
Donald Kuspit wrote about Johnson’s work in WhiteHot Journal in 2024:
“Johnson is a grasp of abstraction, as his oddly constructivist work present, however of unconscious feeling, for his geometry serves to include and with that management the robust emotions implicit in his robust colours. Other than that, his work are artwork traditionally essential, as a result of they seamlessly fuse abstraction and realism, which Kandinsky tore aside to the detriment of each whilst he acknowledged that they had been implicitly inseparable, tied collectively in a Gordian knot, as they masterfully are in Johnson’s work.”
Johnson’s work are within the everlasting collections of over 35 museums and have appeared steadily within the New York Occasions Journal, the New Yorker, and WSJ Journal. They’ve additionally appeared in quite a few function movies together with The Vacation (2006) and Loopy, Silly, Love (2011).
For extra info, go to mitchelljohnson.com and comply with him on Instagram at @mitchell_johnson_artist.
