Chris Johanson
at Jan Cicero, through February 17
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Some pieces argue that artists are nothing special–that they’re not “the antennae of the race,” as Ezra Pound put it. In number 46, brightly colored curved lines trace the approximate shape of a head and shoulders. The artist’s instructions, written beside the painting, suggest that the viewer take it off the wall and look at its back. There a hand-printed text tells the viewer that this is a picture of “anybodies energy that anybody could paint” and invites him to “copy the basic idea.” For Johanson, transcendence is inseparable from the waste materials he uses and his equalizing view of artists. Number 14, rendered on an especially scruffy piece of brown scrap paper, shows a stairway any of us could have drawn.
The African-American figure in number 17 is labeled “Average Person” and has a cloud of colored smears around his head. A printed text near one edge tells us that the colors represent different “moods, energies, types of thoughts, memories.” Unlike mainstream abstractionists from Kandinsky and Malevich to Rothko and Newman, for whom carefully chosen colors and shapes can produce profound revelations, Johanson sees no preternatural power in his smears. Our interior lives are not unique, he seems to say, and can be represented by quickly applied daubs of color.
Most of these paintings suggest cityscapes, with large empty areas at the top and clusters of small, mostly rectangular shapes at the bottom. Critic John Brunetti notes that Prekop’s palette captures the “distinctive atmospheric conditions of changing Midwestern winter light”–and certainly Chicagoans know that in winter one must develop an appreciation for subtle shades of gray. Where Johanson makes even highly visible differences seem relatively unimportant, Prekop celebrates the smallest distinctions.
Prekop’s seven photographs support this ecological interpretation. Prekop, who’s relatively new to photography, doesn’t make his own prints, so these are relatively straight, unmanipulated images. St. Helens, Oregon shows a parked car facing the Columbia River but separated from it by a tall barbed-wire fence. There are no barriers to nature in San Luis Obispo, which shows a tiny figure dwarfed by a dark forest, recalling Hudson River school landscape paintings; what wilderness is left, Prekop seems to say, remains powerful, almost overwhelming. And Houston, Texas–showing a single small white rectangle, apparently the back of a sign, in the middle of a green lawn–is a wonderful instance of an artist finding his forms in the world. Asked about the picture, Prekop says, “I have a feeling that I didn’t look at the other side–it’s probably a Keep Off the Grass sign, and I probably didn’t want to know I was breaking the rules.” I suspect he also didn’t want to clutter his vision with any more human markings.
