Behind jasper johns exhibition mind12/14/2023 ![]() Johns's principal foray into sculpture coincided with his exploration of painting as object. "The encaustic paintings were done in gray because to me this suggested a different kind of literal quality that was unmoved and unmovable by coloration and thus avoided all of the emotional and dramatic quality of color." SCULPTURE "I used gray encaustic to avoid the color situation," he stated. The choice of gray advanced the cause of literalism (the exploration of paint and canvas themselves as objects) most explicitly because it avoided the distraction of emotion suggested by color. ![]() With their restrained facture and emphasis on commonplace subjects, these works offered an alternative to the visual and critical rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism, the dominant mode of painting in the 1950s. In these canvases, the artist used gray to establish uniformity between flat surfaces and dimensional objects, whether real or implied, using everyday items such as a stretched canvas, a drawer, a ball, a newspaper, and a coat hanger. Once the canvas can be taken to have any kind of spatial meaning, then the object can be taken to have that meaning within the canvas." In 1965, the artist stated: "The canvas is object, the paint is object, and object is object. OBJECTSĪ group of early gray encaustics (produced with wax-based paint that forms a skin when dry) created from 1956 to 1959, emphasizes the idea of painting as object. For Johns, the refusal of color is its own affirmative category. If False Start succeeds in divorcing gesture, color, and emotionalism, Jubilee underscores the differences between thinking in color and thinking without color. But the more sedate Jubilee is not merely a version of the former it is an elaboration on its theme. Superficially, Jubilee is simply a grisaille copy of False Start. Immediately following False Start Johns made a closely related painting in black, white, and gray titled Jubilee. ![]() By embracing this self-conscious, painterly mode of application and simultaneously setting color at odds with language, False Start dismantles the expressive use of gesture and color and creates discordance between what one perceives and reads. The words, which are not intended to match the colors but in some cases do, have been stenciled on the canvas. The first use of the word "gray" in a work by Jasper Johns occurs in the oil painting False Start, in which it appears three times, surrounded by other words naming (but not labeling) colors. Jasper Johns: Gray addresses the practice of creating abstract and representational images imbued with the formal and conceptual associations of a single color. Gray exists in Johns's work not just as color, but also as idea and material. Initially serving as a means of emphasizing the physical properties of an object by draining it of color, the artist's employment of gray has evolved into a larger concern, an examination of the condition of gray itself. The color gray–ranging from warm to cool, light to dark, stringent to lush–has been a singular and unparalleled preoccupation for the artist. Yet single-color experimentations have figured prominently in his work since 1955. One of the most acclaimed and influential American artists of the 20th century, Jasper Johns is rarely considered in relation to monochromatic art. ![]() Stukenberg / Professional Graphics Inc., Rockford, Illinois. Jasper Johns Within 1983 Collection of the artist Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Photo: Jamie M. ![]()
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