Vol. 90 August 27, 2012 – Print the August 27, 2012 Issue
Light Years is an non-cynical look at Los Angeles, a great starting point for new arrivals, and refreshing for long-time residents. Opens September 1 at Bermudez Projects.
Whether at home in Vancouver or visiting Los Angeles, Taylor internalizes his surroundings – by exploring, jogging, and the balcony-leaping, wall-climbing, railing-hurdling sport known as parcours – then uses the mental snapshots to make his kinetic but controlled oil paintings. Kinetic, because Taylor says he uses the act of painting to propel his work. “The work emerges as a fusion of idea and action.”
Taylor’s paintings are almost sense memories. “The painter must immerse his senses in the subject,” he says. “Contemplate it, touch it, move within it, and imprint it on their memory. I move through my environment and observe the junctions, the converging planes, the walls and corridors, the obstacles and openings, the alleys and channels we create to connect us to one another.” That helps him find the deeper purpose, the pulse within the infrastructure framework. “The painter didn’t bring the easel to the riverbank,” Taylor says. “He brought the memory of a profound connection back to the studio, and what is created goes beyond the imagery and details straight to the vital energy and soul of the subject.”
Light Years at Bermudez Projects, Taylor’s first solo show in the US, takes its name from one of a dozen new pieces inspired by Taylor’s last trip to LA. Stand in front of one of them, letting your mind wander into the almost architectural frameworks, and you can grasp Johnny’s vision. As he puts it, “a vision is much like memories themselves: clear yet overlapping, immediate yet distant, dissolving and falling into place at the same instant.” Light Years is an non-cynical look at Los Angeles, a great starting point for new arrivals, and refreshing for long-time residents.
Taylor usually works on a grand scale – the largest painting in Light Years is 8 feet long – but he’s also created more intimate works for us, down to 16 x 24 inches. Taylor likes to be challenged. He bristled a little when we asked for some smaller paintings – since not everyone can fit an 8-foot painting in their studio apartment – but then got excited by the challenge. The larger paintings are oil on architectural drawing film; the smaller are oil on wood panels.