SERPENTINE : SELECTED WORKS BY MATTHEW JOHNSON
Please join us for a Private View and exhibition drinks on Saturday, the 22nd August,from 2-4pm.
When we transition from shore to sea. From ground to water. Our feet leave the solidity under our toes, this, sureness of stability, into a space of subtle dissolution of the self. The body undergoes submersion, gravity loses its firm, decisive grip, sound relaxes into a low, internal vibration, and spatial orientation gently blurs. Sight, not detached as an act of observation across a distance, becomes an enveloping, tactile phenomenon. We do not look into the element, as we gaze through the window at our surroundings; we become enclosed within its light.A liquid visuality. Water refracts, bends the stubborn straight line, and scatters colour into an ambient, shimmering luminescence.
The sea had fallen dark, in submission to the stars... All was movement, all was change, and somehow this was visible and yet unimaginable"- Iris Murdoch The Sea, the Sea
Johnson takes this immersion seriously. Not painting water as an inert object, outside-the-self, to be held in view, but renders a condition of seeing through it. The composition moves with a serpentine cadence; undulating with the sinuous rhythm of currents, the quiet swell, the back and forth seesaw. Shifting patterns of light play and glint and gleam across skin and depth. Here, the canvas showcases an optical surrogate for this immersive world. What Maurice Merleau-Ponty recognised as our deeply embodied nature of perception. We do not observe the world from a clinical distance with our alone eyes; we inhabit: The whole of our physical being. The painted surface becomes an extension of that sensation, drawing into a space where movement, light, and body exist in a single, continuous ebb and flow.
A rigid architectural scaffold or a dry scientific matrix, is not found in confronting Johnson's grids, but an organic, optical phenomenon; Flickering mesh of caustics dancing across a pool floor, light fracturing through suspended sediment, or particles adrift in deep water.
The physical craft of the painting directly mirrors this sensation of aquatic depth. Through the deliberate layering of translucent pigments and transparent glazes, colour bleeds, glows , and subtly transforms as the spectator moves before the canvas, catching light; water shifting under a changing sky. Held, for a moment, in a suspended animation.
The canvas operates simultaneously as a physical boundary and a translucent not-quite window. Sharp, deliberate edges soften into quiet blurs, creating an illusion of spatial depth that sits in productive tension with the flat, painted surface. A calm face of a lake has a picture plane that functions at once as a barrier we gaze upon and an aperture through which we look.
In this light, the familiar dialectic between gestural freedom and ordered abstraction finds its resolution. The grid does tame or constrain nature; rather, it it ripples the visible. at once hidden in a rhythmic geometry of light, softly undulating through liquid motion. Fragile, precise, and alive through the profound psychological weight of immersion. Inside the aquatic element, a distinct stillness, weightless, near meditative isolation that offers a sanctuary from the relentless noise of the waking world. Enclosed by water, one is held in a quiet, suspended space where the mind settles and the body grows light.
Johnson's paintings translate the sheer scale, luminosity, and rich colour fields of this sanctuary directly onto the wall. The viewer experiences a sensation closely akin to standing at the edge of-or stepping directly into-a deep, glowing pool of light wrapped and wraught in these sweeping canvases,The boundary between viewer and artwork subtly dissolving.
The phenomenological picture bridges the gap between the wild, untamed currents of nature and the quiet, highly structured geography of human consciousness. The paintings explore a place in the vastness of the natural world that is internalised, filtered through memory, and reconstituted as an Phenomenological landscape. Seeing through water, as Johnson invites us to do, we see a human perception that is neither static or contained, But, an active, living process. Dynamic, shaping and shaped by our common vision.
Freddie Wright
