The last party Claire Johnson's paintings document the end on an era
Review by Alec Clayton originally published in The OlympianThe dominance of narrative art over the past two decades has opened up new possibilities for contemporary artists, but it has almost destroyed the art of painting as an aesthetic pursuit. Content – what the painting says – has become so important that how the picture is painted becomes meaningless. But in the best of narrative art, style and content perfectly compliment one another. Such is the case with Claire Johnson's paintings at The Evergreen State College, Gallery II.
Stylistically there are historic precedents for the way Johnson paints, going all the way back to the work of Carravagio at the end of the sixteenth century. Carravagio employed dramatic lighting effects and slightly distorted his figures to create a feeling of expansive space. His figures seemed to be coming forward, expanding beyond the confines of the frame.
In more recent times, painters like Alfred Leslie and Jack Beals have pushed that same technique about as far as it can go to create lurid, in-your-face paintings of heightened dramatic intensity. And the super-realist painter, Audrey Flack, has applied the same techniques to still lifes of flowers, fruit and items typically found on dressing tables. Although Flack's paintings look photographic from a distance (and even more so in reproduction), they are actually composed of blotches of color with soft edges that become very abstract when seen up close.
Claire Johnson uses these same styles to stunning effect in a series of paintings based on photographs she took at a Halloween party in 1978 at The Stud, a gay bar in San Francisco. In a wall statement, Johnson speaks of it as being a time of “innocent hedonism” before AIDS. In capturing this time in paint, she seems to have also captured a feeling of impending doom, as if the party is about to become a horror scene. I believe that even without the hindsight we now have that feeling would be conveyed. For example, there are two paintings side by side of the same scene: “Kiss I” and “Kiss II.” In “Kiss I,” a man is getting ready to kiss his partner. He has his hand (tenderly?) on his partner's throat. But that caress can easily be seen as choking. In “Kiss II,” the same scene is shown seconds later. They are kissing. But it looks as if one man is devouring the other.
Throughout the gallery are scenes of a carnival atmosphere that can any second turn to horror. The space is crowded. Claustrophobic. The lighting is harsh, with extreme contrast between light and shadow. The figures, which are mostly about twice life size, are slightly distorted, as if seen through a fish eye lens. Even the placement of the paintings on the gallery walls add to the feeling of claustrophobia, because they are big (averaging about 55 x 80 inches) and are jammed close together. And everything is red, red, red. A burning cadmium red against almost black shadows.
Only one painting in the show varies from the overall red, and it is a blue painting titled “Blue Light.” As cold as a snow scene at night, this painting could symbolize the bleak reality at the end of the party. The two main figures are seen in extreme closeup. One is a man with a blue face, with violet highlights. The other is an androgynous figure cropped at the bottom right of the canvas like a face out of one of Toulouse-Lautrec's bar scenes.
“Gisele” is a painting of two figures surrounding a third figure, which is slightly behind. The front figures are seen from about mid-torso to the top of their heads. Both are androgynous figures, probably women but possibly men in drag, painted in a bright cadmium red. The left hand figure has a sharp, hooked nose like stereotypical witch, and she is leering. The figure standing between them is an African-American man with a seventies-style Afro. His face is light as if holding a flashlight to his chin. His hair is a dark blue with a halo of white light against a beautiful blue background that visually pushes forward.
The remaining pictures are all crowded with figures in the dense bar scene, with lights and balloons and hanging skeleton decorations. They vary in quality. Most successful are the scenes with closeup figures. Scenes viewed from a slightly more distance vantage point lose the expansive quality that make these so affective. But the relative merits of individual paintings pales in comparison with the theatrical experience of sitting in the gallery and scanning all of the paintings as a single tableau. The feeling is hallucinogenic.
In her wall statement, Johnson acknowledges her debt to Audrey Flack with a humorous and self-depreciating quote: “If you can't make it good, make it big. If you can't make it big, make it red.”
Johnson makes it big. And red. And good.
Top of page © 1999 by Alec Clayton