The Truro Center for the Arts in Castle Hill, Massachusetts, is presenting an exhibition of small paintings by California artist Mitchell Johnson from September 4 to 15. The gallery is open daily from noon to 5 p.m., with an artist reception on Thursday, September 5, from 4 to 6 p.m. Where the Colors Are (Selected Paintings 1989–2024)The exhibition features works from New England, Europe, New York, Newfoundland and California.
Art critic Donald Kuspit reviewed Johnson’s work in 2023 in Whitehot Magazinewhere he expresses his interest in both art history and abstraction:
Art history insidiously infuses itself into all of Johnson’s work – and influences it in ingenious ways. Johnson is a master of abstraction, as his strangely constructivist paintings show, but also of unconscious feeling, for his geometry serves to contain and thus control the strong feelings contained in his bold colors. Apart from that, his paintings are important to art history because they seamlessly combine abstraction and realism, which Kandinsky tore apart to the detriment of both, even though he recognized that they were implicitly inextricably linked, tied together in a Gordian knot, as is masterfully done in Johnson’s paintings.
In a 2012 review for Provincetown ArtAuthor Chris Busa examined the approach Johnson takes in his work:
Many of Johnson’s paintings are named after the places that inspired them, but in reality no such places exist. Each is a collage of compressed intimacies stretched over the months it takes to paint them. He has done what Edwin Dickinson called the “premier coup,” in which a painting is completed in one go outdoors. But he usually leaves a painting in the studio for several months or more to see if it stands the test of repeated viewing. This often involves a process of memory correction, in which a sequence of impressions gained over weeks or months are expressed as a continuous flow.
In 1990, Mitchell Johnson moved to Palo Alto, California, to work for artist Sam Francis, shortly after completing his MFA at Parsons School of Design in New York City. During the 1990s, he commuted between California, New York, and Europe, creating landscape and figure paintings. In the 2000s, repeated trips to the Danish island of Bornholm and a chance visit to a Josef Albers/Giorgio Morandi exhibition in Bologna led to a decisive shift in his approach. Johnson turned to a more deliberately organized picture plane, in which larger forms serve as scaffolds for commentary on the tension between artificially created and naturally occurring color. His paintings are in the permanent collections of over 30 museums.
For more information, visit mitchelljohnson.com and follow him on Instagram at @mitchell_johnson_artist.
In addition to the exhibition in Truro, Johnson’s paintings are the subject of a museum retrospective at the Musée Villa les Camélias in Cap d’Ail, France, until September 29.
