Tim Johnson: Synergies. Nancy Sever Gallery, Gorman Arts Centre, 55 Ainslie Avenue, Braddon. Wednesday to Sunday 11am - 5pm. Until August 25.
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![Tim Johnson, 'Karmapa', 2018 (detail) in Synergies at Nancy Sever Gallery. Picture: Supplied Tim Johnson, 'Karmapa', 2018 (detail) in Synergies at Nancy Sever Gallery. Picture: Supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/doc76gwv3a88pvgy7d73ma.jpg/r0_0_4724_3547_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Over several decades, Tim Johnson has devised a peculiar and unique artistic language that has become a hallmark of his art making; a Tim Johnson painting is recognisable from a hundred paces.
The backgrounds of his canvases are usually made up of a shimmering sea of small coloured dots that he has appropriated from Aboriginal Central Desert art and, suspended within this sea, is imagery derived from Tibetan Buddhism, as well as from Chinese Confucianism and Japanese art.
To disrupt any notion that we are dealing with some sort of historical eclecticism, Johnson will mix into his floating narrative elements from ufology (in other words, dealing with UFOs and other hints at extra-terrestrial life) together with bits from popular culture, classical cinema and French symbolist poetry.
Johnson's narratives have something of a quicksilver quality about them, where the moment you think that you have put your finger on their meaning, a transformation occurs and meaning once more becomes elusive and slippery. The paintings evoke a contemplative, meditative state instead of a tangible storyline - they communicate on an intuitive visual level, rather than on a verbal one.
In his catalogue essay, Johnson writes about this exhibition, "I still believe that it's possible to create an anima or a patina in a painting, where the whole is more than the sum of the parts. In an age of social media where imagery saturates the culture, often in quite dazzling ways, the artist reflecting change, looking for meaning, innovating, and often sacrificing materialism can help things change for the better."
![Tim Johnson, 'New metamorphosis', 2019 in Synergies at Nancy Sever Gallery. Picture: Supplied Tim Johnson, 'New metamorphosis', 2019 in Synergies at Nancy Sever Gallery. Picture: Supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/doc76gwzpzj1814ldhj3ma.jpg/r0_0_3543_2953_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
In Johnson's manner of work and his prodigious output, the quality of the individual paintings fluctuates. The idea is that what is important is the totality of output, the entire diaristic opus, where the individual elements, the paintings, are fragments of a whole and there is no single great culmination, a "chef d'oeuvre" or masterpiece. Some periods in his art making are particularly fecund, others are more uneven.
Aged in his early 70s, Johnson has completed most of the work this year where he has been working at the height of his powers. The work is not hurried, the brush marks are decisive and the colour palette (within the artist's self-imposed pastel-like conventions) is quite bright and luminous.
Some of the imagery is self-reflexive, returning to interests in cinema that he held as a teenager - Cocteau, Renoir, Robbe-Grillet, Resnais - in other instances, eschatological elements seem to creep in, as in the strange and troubling painting On the net (1995-2019).
One of the key paintings in this exhibition is the large acrylic canvas Syncretism (2019), measuring 183 by 152 centimetres, which has been executed in collaboration with Daniel Bogunovic.
The idea of collaboration is also central to Johnson's practice: whether it is the Serbian Bogunovic, Tibetan Karma Phuntsok or the Vietnamese My Le Thi, each collaborator brings a new cultural dimension to the painting.
The temples and religious symbols, floating within the sea of variously coloured dots, carry within them an ancient wisdom, sometimes tapping into complex esoteric and philosophical issues. The intent of the painting is not only to provide imagery that can be deciphered by the viewer, but imagery that will trigger associations within the viewer - a certain transcendental state.
Other major paintings in this exhibition, including New Metamorphosis (2019) and Karmapa (2018), also manage to work the Johnson magic on the viewer, which, in many ways, is out of this world.