BE THEREFiend Club LoungePresented by Priska C. Juschka Fine Art October 15, 2005- November 12, 2005Aaron JohnsonPriska C. Juschka Fine Art is pleased to announce Fiend Club Lounge, Aaron Johnson's second solo exhibition at the gallery. In his innovative painting process of acrylic and collage on synthetic mesh, Johnson presents a carnival of carnal imagery bubbling with inner conflicts, where the beautiful unmasks the horrific, and torrid love escalates into vicious battle.In this new body of work, Johnson introduces a hallucinatory arena, in which a cast of nightmarish characters acts out comic-grotesque antics in a theater of clashing painting tropes. These creatures are simultaneously feeding and devouring each other, making love and massacring one another. Cross-sectional views reveal squirming viscera, while in others the distorted body is concealed beneath highly ornate clothing. A salivating fiend decked out in an argyle suit with his chomping, festering flesh oozing out from underneath his refinements, suggests that beneath the veils of culture and sophistication we are all insatiable beasts. In accordance with his clashing imagery, Johnson employs opposing pictorial languages, drawing upon diverse influences of biological illustration, Indian miniatures, surrealism, abstract expressionism, and hard-edged geometry. Rigid modernist structures are juxtaposed with organic, biomorphic, and at times psychedelic forms to produce a visual feast of excess. Appropriate to the corporeal content of his work, Johnson has created a novel peeled-paint process- a visceral approach that picks painting apart from its innards. His concoction of 'mad-scientist' procedures melds meticulous collage, miniature painted elements, and chaotic gushes of oozing paint. Johnson uses this mesh base as an underlying grid skeleton, flooding and clotting it with different layers of paint. The physicality of paint is pushed through this convoluted process to produce a fertile breeding ground for narratives that seek to examine the human condition.
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