ART CITIES:Los Angeles-Matt Johnson
Renowned for his wry marriages of everyday subjects with raw physical matter, Matt Johnson’s sculptures explore the paradox of visual forms through unorthodox and surprising materials. Whether rendering concentric Hula Hoops in steel to resemble nuclear diagrams or plastic beer cups in painted bronze, Johnson’s sculptures point not only to the gestural potential of consumer experience, but to the primitive connection humans have with materiality. Recently focusing on wood carvings of crumpled objects of refuse, Johnson’s painstaking renderings of crushed boxes, broken Styrofoam pads, and smashed plastic present tossed-off remnants of everyday life as sublime formalism.
By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: Blum & Poe Gallery Archive
In an ever-expanding practice in search of the peculiar and the sublime, Matt Johnson elevates the mundane to the exceptional. With a new body of work in carved and polychromed wood sculpture, at Blum & Poe Gallery in Los Angeles, Johnson depicts configurations of raw industrial materials from cinder block, brick, rebar, to traffic cones-permutations of information composed according to gravity, balance, and primitive instinct. A crude horse, a procession of block figures, cantilevered props, and fragile towers make reference to the concept of knowledge with small gestures—a lighter, a match book, a lightbulb, an atlas, and a monograph on Matisse. The doweled joints of glue and/or epoxy between bricks, blocks, and bars exist here not to defy gravity but to freeze balance and preserve delicate moments of experimental groupings. Like a still life, these works are organized information, like subatomic particles, atoms and elements, molecules and compounds, glued by gravity, and magnetic polarity, surfing in a sea of electrical conductivity. There are fourteen works in this show that encompass a spare minimalism. No illusions are cast, the objects are carved actors on a set, executing their performances, restricted only by their painted, wooden, physical existence. Cobbled together “7 block 36 brick horse” (2019) is supported by two stacks of bricks under a grazing head and hanging tail. This arched multi-cinderblock body, poised on brick legs and buttressed by the supporting brick stacks, seemingly makes gravitational sense. The crude Deborah Butterfield-esque horse form transcends the building materials depicted, yet the addition of the stacked buttresses return the composition to its industrial component parts layered on the ground. In “6 block standing figure with a cigarette” (2019), six cinderblocks are positioned to form a stick figure that feels both contemporary and primitive. In “Traffic cone with a block and a lighter” (2019), we have a balancing act where a green Bic lighter is set atop a cinderblock which itself is perched precariously upon a bright orange traffic cone. This sculpture encapsulates a great part of Johnson’s practice-freezing moments of gravitational equilibrium in an effort to exploit our shared understanding of weight and entropy.
Info: Blum & Poe, 2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, Duration: 9/11/19-11/1/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blumandpoe.com
