Concerned with the extremities of perception—the telescopic and, especially, the microscopic—Kysa Johnson’s appealing brand of conceptual painting and drawing evokes the structural poetry at the very base of things. Inspired by essential biological forms and processes, the elegant renderings on view in her first New York solo show (in ink, watercolor, and most often chalk on blackboard) operate in a territory somewhere between lyrical abstraction and literal representation. Their focus is that level of observation where the familiar “real” forms of the world begin to resolve into the fantastical, hidden shapes that lie at the foundation of all matter.
Unlike an artist such as Matthew Ritchie, who similarly teases visually arresting forms from esoteric scientific information, Johnson generally keeps her distance from her subject matter, usually opting not to massage the imagery and the ideas behind it into high-toned conceptual frameworks or personal cosmologies. Instead, she typically directs our attention back toward the thing in question, whether it’s the skittering paths of elemental particles depicted as a dynamic thicket of linear color in Blow up 45—subatomic decay patterns, 2004, or the blossoming fronds of bacteria that fill her composition like foliage on a Chinese landscape scroll in Blow up 34—tuberculosis, 2004, a gorgeous two-panel chalk drawing whose sixteen-foot-long blackboard surface dominated an entire wall of the gallery. The latter drawing was hung in what functioned as a quarantine zone, joined by smaller works representing the bacterial structures of pneumonia and whooping cough. This suite of killer diseases concluded with a literal foil, Blow up 37—penicillin, 2004, a delicate watercolor-and-graphite image of the structure of the antibiotic whose filigree tendrils, in Johnson’s rendering, suggest an exotic species of deep-sea flora.
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Read the full review at artforum.com
