Second Seed
Paul Johnson

28 February - 6 April 2003

Through a ruby veil, Johnson’s second division sports pastimes expose themselves to our sudden telepathic vision. Johnson’s plastic paintings don’t come off in one go though. One has to peer through the diaphanous surface to collect the fragments of the tableau. You are stuck in front of them staring hard; your eyes begin to hurt, and you wonder if there is in fact anything there at all. This is at once provoking, and key to the reading of the work. The graphic qualities function on a different time frame. There is no narrative explosion, instead only the slow release of tensions, emptying out into strange, imaginative worlds. It is a clarity of perception that allows for uncomfortable diffuseness.

The place on the other side of the picture is as real as can be detailed. Not a theatre of obsession, full of superfluous minutiae, but a destination that needs to be more than a picture of a place. These are functioning spaces where strangeness can act itself out as completely as any latent daydream might. It is here that we come under the influence of incongruous elements, from the uncanny to the out of place; no Johnson work is without its murderous undercurrent. And it is this dark drive that attaches to his scenes - 80’s slasher B-movie locations, ordinary, outside the media eye, and controlled by their own rules, we are taken away from the normalising effect of ‘context’, where modernism won’t hear you scream.

Johnson constructs these paintings out of cut out pieces. His attitude to his practice is intense. In its laboriousness it is the epitome of concentration and rigour. Yet he also makes it the sight for the event of chance and coincidence. There is nothing flaccid in the occurrence of occult elements in his imagery. They are locked away in the carcass of the painting like talismans against the madness of trying to see every single detail.

What is most surprising about the new works is not the curious world they depict nor the particular way they are made. What is most striking is the way that they demand their own way of looking.

Milk-Side Go-Kart Shop Ceiling Spirit 2003
Pantone, plastic and paper, 54cm x 49cm