Elena Johnson Art

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A hallmark of Modernism was the idea that art was autonomous. Serious paintings and sculptures, it was said, stood on their own, apart from the messy connections of narrative possibility and the nitty gritty specificity of historical references. Art’s job, it seemed, was to deliver out-of-body experiences.

Elena Johnson’s paintings suggest just the opposite: that painting is most powerful when it does not stand apart from viewers but draws us into dramas from which we cannot disentangle ourselves without considerable effort – and psychological cost. Her exquisitely painted pictures of serene figures whose bodily mutations are neither gross nor disgusting physically articulate those extraordinary yet common moments when the body’s boundaries dissolve, and it becomes impossible to distinguish one’s self from another’s, or to determine, precisely, where one’s inner being ends and the external world begins.

Set against pristine white fields (sometimes punctuated with fluid flourishes) Johnson’s larger-than-life size men and women eschew the shock of Surrealism for the calm of reverie. In and before her works, the imagination floats free of reality’s conventions and restraints, capturing truths that may not be visible to the naked eye but resonate, poetically, in the mind’s-eye. Intimate, lovely, and mysterious, Johnson’s contemplative images treat the human body as an expansive, interactive universe from which no one is excluded and whose potential tends toward the infinite.

David Pagel

Elena Johnson’s nudes uneasily inhabit the limbo wherein a model’s individuality is transformed into subject matter for an artist. Aspects of the subjects’ characters resolve briefly, only to retreat behind a formal grace. Each figure’s proliferation of gesture, generated by an excess of limb, expresses the impotency of a repressed consciousness.

It is Johnson’s minimal application of paint that clarifies her ideological distance from the opportunistic eroticism of traditional figuration. Her reduction of mass to linear form endangers the figures without sexually objectifying them, avoiding an antagonistic investigation of sexual politics. Instead, she critiques the subjectivity of representation on a personal and intimate scale. Johnson’s nudes are not stripped in sensual subjugation. Reflecting a more compassionate, though equally problematic, motive for figuration, they are stripped of contextualizing signifiers of class or community in order to read as spirits.

Unenlightened Shivas defined and bound by corporeality, her figures coil further and further inward within their many limbs. Despite their efforts to prop and position their own awkwardly flourishing flesh, the figures seem lost within the anti-gravity of the picture plane. The white ground invades each figure, de-substantiating it. An incandescent contour barely describes them, shifting and shimmering in hue. This ephemeral mark gives each figure a sheen of psychic exertion, as if retaining their form requires great effort. Nebulous blotches of clotted paint appear in some of the paintings like specters of collapsed representation. Their figurative counterparts share the composition with a gentle wariness, embodying the anxious state of figuration itself, and eliciting sympathy as they slide dangerously towards abstraction.

Elizabeth Sims