Film by Eric Minh Swenson. Johnson’s paintings combine and explore dynamic opposites: expansiveness and compression, darkness and light. Johnson uses color to evoke the contemporary urban, digital and natural landscape of Southern California, and skews the vocabulary of abstraction into a hybrid techno-language. His compositions use broad open shapes with convex/concave edges against multi-planed bands, evoking atmospheric spatial shifts. The diagonal structures possibly allude to car windows or an opening retina, each exposing a radiant vastness. Johnson’s use of color is intuitive, though his Pop inspired vision comes from the commercial tangle of Southern California city structure. Whether observing the curvature of freeway interchanges or bright noon daylight, Johnson’s work is a clear balance of the harmonic and dissonant qualities in our environment. Los Angeles Times art critic David Pagel writes of Johnson’s work, “These seemingly calm arrangements of gently curved shapes, in a sumptuously saturated and wildly unnatural palette, are anything but wallflowers. They play with scale like nobody’s business, filling the empty space around them with inclusive, user-friendly snippets of imagined symphonies. As quickly as they energize the space around them, Johnson’s idiosyncratic compositions set up kinky rhythms—beats and echoes that lead one way only to be interrupted by any number of possibilities.” For more info on Eric Minh Swenson visit his website at thuvanarts.com. His art films can be seen at thuvanarts.com/take1
Dion Johnson
Momentum
January 16, 2024
