![]() Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins and Co., New York Louis Fratino: July, 2020, oil on canvas, 57 by 38 inches. That’s a feeling I get from much of Johns’s work: he’s revealing the factual truth of something but not showing a picture of it. It truthfully records the body’s shapes and forms. A body print is a very truthful and unforgiving process of revealing oneself. I’ve wanted to do that too, and after I saw Johns’s body prints in “Gray” at the Met in 2008, I tried some of my own. He reveals himself, but only in an anonymous way. The parts of his body in Target with Plaster Casts aren’t just his-they’re the highlights of a male body. As if he needs to be seen but only partially, or only from certain vantage points. The prints and the casts seem to come out of Johns’s longtime interest in himself as something to be seen but not seen. ©2021 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York ![]() Jasper Johns: Skin, 1965, charcoal on oil paper, 22 by 34 inches. The plaster casts are also spiraling inward. By rolling his head across the paper he rendered a face from multiple angles, a person doubling inward. He made other body prints like these, and they’re very similar to the casts. In Study for Skin I (1962), you can see a choreographed roll of his face from side to side, captured in charcoal on paper. They force you to accept marks in all their particularities. Like Johns, I’m really interested in potato-stamp, snow-angel types of printing processes, the simplest forms of printmaking. When he works with encaustic it’s like he’s making casts of marks. Johns is the great granddaddy of the readymade mark. He has remade his body as a found object. Johns’s foot was in the world and now it’s part of the painting. The stillness makes the work feel creepy and deathlike, but also alive, like a very challenging puzzle. There’s a stillness and a concentration that’s so simple and literal. But the body in Johns’s work feels frozen, like time has been sucked out of the room. So much art that is about the body is about movement, evoking an active gesture. Keltie Ferris: Trifecta, 2015, oil and powdered pigment on paper, 491/2 by 52 inches.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |