Johan Scott—PaintingsModern Totems In a painting the highest achievement, and perhaps the most satisfying beauty, is balance. Though the surface in a non-figurative painting is covered in drips, designs, blotches or fields of color, in a successful work, an order is brought to and viewable from these marks. Most of the paintings in this show belong to that pleasing and inspiring realm that is the most generous of places because from it we are given the solution to a particular problem in a fulfilled and permanized expression of a moment's peculiar passion. The ten untitled 38" x 50" works in this show, hung five each on opposite walls, at first seem to be displayed too close together because of their disparity but once initiated you realize that though they're all created with different forms and ideas they can fit together the way individuals make up a team. In fact, they do belong to diptych and triptych sets without sharing any common symbols, patterns, shapes, figures or ideas we expect in a set. Instead, they, and the show as a whole, are bound by a flexible and assorted yet distinctive visual vocabulary that has no time to repeat itself. That the works in their disparity look like they've all been done by the same artist, attests to a strong command of formal methods and solutions. Someone said, "A painting is a magical object." These paintings with their rough textures put one in mind of the representational figures found carved on cave walls or objects, sometimes magical, forged using stones to shape them. While his techniques and effects are forceful, they are as sensitive in their application and the results as superior in quality, conception and appearance as a Rembrandt etching. There are definitions evident—starting places. In one painting we seem to be looking down at an object that was perhaps modeled on a football and higher up a large forbidding but complacent shape that shares the physical definitions of a tongue depressor or torpedo. What matters though in looking at this painting, what is beautiful and haunting (like a totem or symbol that has lasted centuries) and what it is difficult to give a feeling of, is its encompassing scale and the vibration of colors and textures, rough shadows and scraped surfaces that all contribute to affect an overall stillness, a still life without objects, a still life of pure shared ideas. Scott is not attempting to represent or portray anything ordinary. Impressions are merely part of his accessible visual language. Another painting is composed of two bright red arcing lines supporting each other, an arc with its reflection, painted over a background of metallic copper leaf tiles that have a chipped wall surface with what could be a galactic view of a piece of the earth or moon the way Ptolemy might have thought about it: black, browns and white creating a snapshot of a crack in space. Across the room is a painting dominated by a large black figure that resembles a cast iron kettle left for years on the barren terrain near the Arctic Circle. This evocation isn't mere hinting since the works are all infused with the chilly, isolated and essential landscape of the island of Aland, off the coast of Finland, where the artist grew up. The accomplished unities and harmonies evident in these firm compositions—designs fitted together, surfaces gone over in washes and layers of color and gently put in set motion with other ideas—attain an order that is made from and exudes the rough, vital confidence one would need to survive in that harsh terrain. The colors of the show, ranging from lava orange and tangent red through unnatural blues to blue-grays, chlorophyll green and kettle copper are all implicated with heavy brush strokes layered on in short quick dabs or longer strokes neatly outlining a shape or with the look of the fire behind an idea. Here is the brutality of the barest elements corralled and forged to serene beauty by craft and gentle order. Those who have sorely missed a sense of structure or strong formal qualities in paintings lately displayed in New York City, are strongly urged to see this show. (Arts, September 1984) |