Chris Johanson

Vedanta Gallery, Chicago Through February 17
Bodybuilder and Sportsman Gallery, Chicago Through February 17

This could be a glimpse of a possible future for art: a self-taught 32 year-old San Francisco skateboarder, cartoonist, and grunge-rock musician, with a background as a graffiti artist, showing 75 recent works split between two Chicago galleries. Chris Johanson keeps them coming fast and loose; the sheer number and immediate clarity of his works makes the examination of them a pretty quickened engagement.

His witty and pointed vignettes combine a kind of liberating disdain for materials with an irreverence and little-mediated charm that makes his work extremely efficient. His little scrawled paintings on bits of found wood or paper are stupidly and stupendously inventive—quick and surprising bursts of a kind of humane cynicism that is sometimes poignant and disarming.

All of Johanson’s works are untitled and it rarely seems as if any of these took him more than a few minutes to execute. But that’s no problem. They work well, with their, perhaps, tongue-in-cheek flaying of bits of the human comedy. His works are little aphorisms, terse witticisms that tend to encourage conformity and to be suspicious of what is vested in the myth of individuality, always alive to a charming and belittling irony of every aspect of self in society.

Johanson painted fifteen balloon heads in bright colors in Doesn’t know what to do (2000). Fourteen have smarmy, satisfied grins upon their faces; the kind of complacent vacancy that is numbingly content. There is one, however, which is frowning, with the text “DOES’NT KNOW WHAT TO DO” scrawled beneath it (the incorrect spelling of ‘doesn’t’ further emphasizing the “stupidity”). A small and turgid all-brown squareish painting has written upon it “THE FUTURE MAY BE THIS COLOR AND SHAPE,” and one suspects that Johanson might just be right.




James Yood