Flea Street restaurant in Menlo Park, California, presents an exhibition of paintings by Bay Area artist Mitchell Johnson. On view from December 12, 2023, through February 29, 2024, Selected Work, 1988–2023 will feature early landscapes and figures from France, Italy, New Mexico, and more recent cityscapes of Paris, San Francisco, and New York.
Poet W.S. Di Piero wrote about Johnson’s work in a 1998 exhibition catalogue:
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Johnson’s working habits establish a certain picture-by-picture rhythm. In the Italian scenes, when he moves from landscape to figures, the paintings swing formally from large and somewhat gestural to more tightly built constructions. In one big yellow landscape of sunflowers, the horizon comes and goes, changing consistency, and a buttery gray sky is played off against a field of rushing prickled yellows. The space changes, too, depending on where he’s working. His New Mexico landscapes have an expansiveness, a feeling for space as magnitude, quite different from the denser, almost compacted space of the Italian work.
Some painters work hard to analyze and break down formal properties, to disintegrate or combust. Mitchell Johnson works for subtle consistencies and wholeness. When he showed me a Louisa Matthiasdottir picture that he admires, he dwelled on one detail, the shadow of a foot made of three or four hues laid in to make one solid tone. It makes something very complex look very simple. That’s what I’m after.
Selected Work, 1988–2023 is on view December 12, 2023–February 29, 2024, at Flea Street, located at 3607 Alameda de las Pulgas in Menlo Park, California.
Many of the paintings at Flea Street will travel to the Villa Les Camélias Museum in Cap d’Ail, France, for an exhibition from May 17 through September 29, 2024. The show, Apres Meyreuil (35 Ans de Peinture), will feature 40 paintings and explore the experimentation and color in Johnson’s diverse body of work.
For more information, visit mitchelljohnson.com and follow him on Instagram at @mitchell_johnson_artist.
Source: Hyperallergic.com