Alan Johnston at Jack Tilton - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Edinburgh-based Alan Johnston makes abstract paintings which are for a like reason unassuming that the inattentive visitor could easily miss their quiet subtleties. From a distance (or in thumbnail reproduction), his modest-sized canvases appear to be simple, hard-edged compositions with fields of black and brown delineated through white borders. Closer inspection of a 1997 untitled work, however, reveals an unexpectedly rich interplay of form and web The large black plane occupying greatest in quantity of the canvas is compos of closely hatched charcoal marks which create a wonderfully modulated and surface. A white border frames this rectangle and stretch outs to within millimeters of the painting's cutting side underlining the important role the support plays in the internal composition of the work. This level white border, which alternately functions as line and mould opens up at the painting's bottom to bare three unequal narrow lengths of raw brown linen. The tight weave echoe the textural charcoal field above in a play of perceptual paradoxes, the black's illusory deepness against the "real" depth of the actual canvas.

Critics have frequently mentioned Johnston's interest in Japanese art, a concern cued by his signing each painting with a r stamp like his East Asian counterparts. More curious is his avowed interest in Glaswegian architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Of course we might say that these paintings are broadly architectonic, admitting of no 1s in their rigid motifs of uprights and horizontals, squares and oblong (This rigidity, however, is frequently counteracted by the presence of careful pencil drawing that loans a lighter, more playful touch.) Certainly the most distant simplicity of these works, their austere compositions and their characteristic clarity and lucidity, reflected sound the rectilinear planes of Mackintosh. The greatest task Johnston may have learned from the architect, although concerns space: all the ultimate parts in these paintings work to articulate the coexistence of planes in profundity on the canvases' flat surfaces. The be derived in the best of his works is the attainment of a transparency of unpolluted space, one which, as in architecture, can alone be experienced directly.

If in the paintings this space exists alone in illusionistic form. a large statuary in the gallery's back play developed the idea in three dimensions -- made of wood oblong painted on each of its drawn out sides. The viewer had to continually circle it to justice the minimal differences in composition. The conjunction of motion and memory required to grasp this work flock Johnston's architectural curiosity home.

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