Johns' new abstraction takes it to the Bridge

Forget for a moment the American flags and labeled U.S. maps that recall the classic Jasper Johns. In these recent paintings, whose soothing and delightfully imperfect grays invite the viewer in at first glance, image gives way to depth. Suddenly the work manages to please with so little, not because these works are obvious but because they are sparse, because they inspire the viewer to synthesize the details into her own maps.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is "Bridge," which hangs opposite the wall supporting its drawing. Most of the canvas, which poses around the edges as wood, is gray. The first shock arises not from the monochrome, however, but from the energy of the inner paintings. Two small rectangles of the same size represent the galaxy and the Big Dipper. These stand out from the scope of gray that covers most of the painting.

COURTESY YUAG Connect Jasper's dots—you just might get a catenary.

A string, either painted or real, swoops through almost all of the paintings. Each catenary is pulled by gravity into a curve, which mirrors Johns' artistic process of surrendering to external forces: inspiration, not intention, shapes these works. As Johns himself once said, "the final statement... has to be what you can't avoid saying, not what you set out to say." By hanging off the piece, the catenary abolishes the assumed two-dimensionality of a painting and expands the viewer's perception. Even empty space brings meaning to the works. The catenary ventures off the canvas (and is thrown back on it in shadows) in a fragile effort to express nothing more than the need to express. Meaning conceals itself on these canvases, where a warm, textured gray predominates; the works rely on the viewer to infuse them with significance.

Although "Bridge" encompasses many stylistic themes of the other paintings, it should not be seen as a culmination of the entire exhibit. Its placement as a point of focused magnetism for the viewer initially downplays the uniqueness of the surrounding paintings. With their nuances of color and semi-hidden stenciled words, however, these other works vindicate themselves as separate wholes.

In "Untitled," for example, the galaxy image remains, but a flag and a family portrait have been added; besides these and the intaglio material (redolent of watercolor), this painting is otherwise quite like "Bridge." By presenting memories of childhood, which he also does in the "Halloween" paintings alongside household images of the flag and the Milky Way, Johns once again challenges the quest for meaning. Is the painting a private recollection of a moment or a statement directed at the public?

Perhaps the answer is that Johns appeals to a universal past. His images jog the memory. We look at a connect-the-dots sketch of the Big Dipper that at once recalls childhood puzzles and the dizzying night sky and imagine a constellation. Nothing in this diagram, however, even approaches reality: the yellow dots look more like small candies than stars. Johns' stick figure version of the Big Dipper reflects the simplistic world view that our language gives us. His separation of the galaxy from the constellation and from the gray reminds us that we isolate things by naming them. We impose order and then imagine meaning, forgetting that we built the container for that meaning in the first place. Johns reveals to the viewer the inadequacy of her definitions.

The Bridge paintings launch us into the millennium with ideas about thought and thoughts of new ideas. His progression from stenciled color names to stenciled scrambles, from flags and maps to abstract affirmations of uncertainty, casts an obscure light of optimism onto the future. We don't know where we are, we can't know where we're going, but somehow we know to continue searching for meaning. Suggesting Samuel Beckett's theory that "to be an artist is to fail," Johns' works in this exhibition cannot supply that meaning. But Johns' failure is a charming one.

Back to A&E...