Mitchell Johnson : Giant Paintings from New England, California and Newfoundland - Article by Donald Kuspit

 Mitchell Johnson, Trinity East (Iceberg), 2020-2024, 78x120 inches, oil/canvas.

By DONALD KUSPIT March 9, 2025

 

…this pleasure of traveling is a testimony of uneasiness and irresolution, and, in sooth,

these two are our governing and predominating qualities.

Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1580

Mitchell Johnson has travelled to France and Italy to paint, absorbing himself in the landscape or townscape—in France, the small town of Meyreuil, near Aix en Provence, where Cezanne lived; in Italy, the small town of Lucignano D’Asso, in Tuscany, “one of the most beautiful villages of Italy.”  The paintings that respond to these environments are as intimate as they are.  The towns are far from San Francisco, where Johnson lives, and New York, where he grew up—cosmopolitan centers in which Meyreuil and Lucignano would disappear, at best become suburbs.  Artists have always travelled to foreign places for inspiration—Matisse to Morocco, Paul Klee to Tunisia and Egypt—but none travelled so far afield from their homeland as Johnson does from his.  Is it escapism, a search for novelty—the “different,” even alien, suggesting his alienation from the United States, his homeland—or a search for inspiration, the radically different affording a “sensation of the new,” the foreign an exotic trigger for fresh perceptions and conceptions?  Or, as I think, testimony to the peculiar “uneasiness and irresolution”—anxiety--that I think Johnson feels in America, embodied in his peculiarly nightmarish, bleak paintings of the abandoned, empty, intimidating Domino Sugar factory complex on the East River in Brooklyn, New York.  He fled from it to sunny California, and to sunny small town Europe, and from both to New England—on the other side of the United States, and finally to Newfoundland, far from and colder and bleaker than New England. 

 Mitchell Johnson, Giant Race Point Chair, 2021, 78x68 inches, oil/canvas.
 

Johnson has said “Each painting is an experiment, a trial to see if I myself can better understand color and if I can make something out of the overwhelming feelings I experience with certain color situations, certain patterns,” which strongly suggests his affinity with Kandinsky, who famously wrote that “color is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul” and who argued that “the only judge, guide, and arbitrator [of abstract forms] should be one’s feelings.”   Peter Selz has said that Johnson’s “realist paintings are basically abstract paintings and [his] abstract paintings are figurative,” that is, representational or realistic.  This also leads to Kandinsky’s remark that between the “two poles” of art, “the Great Abstraction” and “the Great Realism,” the “purely artistic” and “objective,” “the abstract” and “the real,” there are “many possible combinations.”  Johnson’s paintings do not simply combine the purely artistic abstract and the objectively real—they are as much convincing examples of what psychoanalysts call reality testing, more particularly a tour de force demonstration of the inseparability of what they call internal reality (feeling) and external reality (object). 

Johnson’s thematic objects re-appear in the paintings, often hyperbolically emphasized to hypnotic and hallucinatory effect—the iceberg in Trinity East (Iceberg), 2020-2024; the race point chair in Giant Race Point Chair, 2021, which alludes to Race Point Chair (Philip), 2019-2021; the San Francisco Bay Bridge in Presidio #30 (Deauville) and Presidio #32 (Colonial), both 2025, bring to mind Johnson’s recurrent interest in—fascination with—the famous bridge; Two Boats (Cape Porpoise), which alludes to Cape Porpoise (Persian Rose), 2016 and Cape Porpoise (Pink Shirt), 2017; and Buoys (Rosenquist), 2022-2025, which seems to allude to Not Really Buoys, 2021.  The scene objectively changes but remains essentially the same. 

North Truro (Ebisu), 2024, 120x78 inches, oil/canvas.

Commenting on Presidio #32 (Colonial) Johnson writes that the painting “inevitably takes on a political theme in the controversy over the future of this precious California landmark.” Similarly, he remarks that Buoys (Rosenquist), apparently “on the verge of kitsch…is clearly tied to the chaos of 2025.”  I think these remarks, however suggestive, miss the subliminal emotional—expressive--point of Johnson’s paintings, implicit in North Truro (Ebisu), 2024.  “Ebisu is a Japanese word that means ‘god of fishermen and fortune.’  Ebisu is also known as the laughing god because he is often depicted with a big smile.”  I don’t know any work of Johnson in which the colors do not smile at you, that is, are bright with light.  Ebisu is one of the seven gods of fortune; the god has clearly smiled at Johnson.  There are Ebisu restaurants and shops in Japan; Johnson’s painting suggests there is one in Truro on Cape Cod—a fishing place.

 Mitchell Johnson, Presidio #32 (Colonial),” 2025, 78x120 inches, oil/canvas.

Two Boats (Cape porpoise), 2023, 44x70 inches, oil/canvas.

 Mitchell Johnson, Presidio #30 (Deauville), 2025, 86x54 inches, oil/canvas.

 Buoys (Rosenquist),” 2022-2025, 120x78 inches, oil/canvas.
 

Morandi and Albers are Johnson’s role models or mentors.  To my mind’s eye they are phenomenologists par excellence, which is what Johnson is at his best—as in these paintings--aspires to be, however unwittingly.  According to the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, in the Phenomenology of Perception, “Phenomenology is a transcendental philosophy which places in abeyance the assertions arising out of the natural attitude, but it is also a philosophy for which the world is ‘already there.’  It is painstaking…in its attentiveness and wonder, its demand for awareness.”  As the philosopher John Cogan writes, in The Phenomenological Reduction, “There is an experience in which it is possible for us to come to the world with no knowledge or preconceptions in hand; it is the experience of astonishment…in the experience of astonishment, our everyday ‘knowing,’ when compared to the knowing that we experience in astonishment, is shown up as a pale epistemological imposter.”  At their best, when they have a kind of parsimonious aesthetic intensity and nuanced exactitude, and no longer register as the “belief-performance of our customary life in the world,” they are astonishing masterpieces of phenomenological perception, fraught with what the philosopher George Santayana calls “hushed reverberations.” WM