Thierry B Fine Art: Circles of Light
Looking at Matthew Johnson’s paintings from the past couple of years, something happens to the eye. With his variations of shimmer, blur, and fuzz, it’s as if Johnson is withholding the possibility of focus, teasing viewers in a finely crafted display of colour and pigment. Small orbs arranged over a grid dance and pulse, shifting in and out of sharpness, sometimes in striated smears that refuse any kind of viewing fixity sometimes in an all-over pattern that quietly hums where a horizontal haze fades into soft tumescence.
At its simplest, Johnson’s formal vocabulary consists of nothing more than circles and squares. His canvas is gridded up in pencil and in each tiny square he paints a round glob of colour, a procedure he has been using since 2000. Johnson sets up a large palette, laying out colour in a very ordered way, and while he works with a sense of the colouration he wants to use, in the process of painting, this can change.
Canvases trace modulations of tone in soft fat discs, each blob of colour reading like a unit of visual information. These bits of information never cohere, they stay discrete. If there is a landscape reference here, it’s one only produced through film in those moving images that, cornily, pull focus on water’s dappling or willfully fuzz nighttime street lights in jazzy city symphonies.
Over time, as the orbs of colour in Johnson’s paintings have grown smaller, and the grid tighter, the number of bits of information on his canvases has increased so that what we get now is not a cinematic “grain” but the glowing pop of pixels. These too stay discrete.
Johnson is hugely popular with my clients both for his style and his collectability. As an artist his commissions are enviable – moving across fashion, architecture and design; his exhibitions are worldwide, and his reputation grows solidly year on year. His work is definitely worth the investment and always hotly contested at auction. These paintings will find a home quickly, so if keen to view please contact the gallery on: +613 9525 0071 or 0413 675 466 for information.
