Wrought from encaustic-the medium Johns brought to modern prominence in his Flags and Targets of the 1950s-on canvas, the work contains various forms, some hard-edge and some soft-, that only gradually reveal a seated man in an interior space. In both scale and complexity, a large untitled 2018 painting rendered in various shades of green anchors this group. This play between planarity and recession appears to mesmerizing effect in the real heart of the show: a number of works in different mediums that, as in “Regrets,” mirror the composition of a source photograph to produce a doubled image. The drawing bears stenciled text and faux bois grain that exacerbate the image’s play of flatness and depth. We see this inspiration most plainly in the exhibition in a charcoal drawing from a series of works revolving around the image of a skeleton flanked by objects and signs (the composition updating his 1986 “Seasons” series-where the central figure is a human silhouette-with a patent sense of mortality). But more profoundly than any Picassoid iconography, it is the legacy of Synthetic Cubism and papier collés that informs Johns’s work. In the same gallery as the new “Regrets” hung three paintings (all untitled and 2017) that allude to Picasso’s weeping women of the 1930s and incorporate a “Rubin’s vase” in which the facial profiles suggest that of the Spanish artist. Johns redoubles and mirrors this absence, producing a vaguely biomorphic motif. Yet most prominent in Johns’s renditions is a shape derived from the negative space where a piece is missing from the photograph. (Johns saw it in an old auction catalogue.) In the image, Freud sits on a bed and covers his face. The composition of the works originates from a 1964 photograph of the painter Lucian Freud that Francis Bacon owned. More compelling than this, however, are paintings and works on paper related to the “Regrets” series that Johns debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in 2014.
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