Ocher washes and rust-toned streaks mask deposits of underpainting across the sixty-3-inch width of Med(al)$, 2021. The oil-and-sumi-ink-on-canvas composition by Los Angeles–based Johann Mun remembers a cave painting, its surface punctuated by crude and mysterious markings. Some of the artist’s interventions in this piece ape mother nature: The ridges of his brushstrokes echo wrinkles in a crag, for occasion, though an arc of black erupts like an obsidian shard among passages of turquoise and smatterings of earthy beiges. These rugged spots are embellished by inscrutable sequences of dots and lines.
This abstraction is a single of eleven canvases on check out for “Paraphrasing the New Ardent Hundreds of years,” Mun’s solo exhibition in this article and initially public presentation of these is effective. If painting is nonetheless considered a medium in crisis, his art asserts that it carries on to endure, no issue how several times it’s been declared useless. Honed over the previous two many years, Mun’s semi-Surrealist, AbEx imagery diverges from his parallel apply as a tattoo artist—a human body of do the job that is more graphic and linear, characterised by whimsically rendered creatures, flora, and baroque patterning.
The artist commences every painting with a line drawing, filling in the styles he creates with color though leaving halos of ground bare all over their edges. With this tactic, Mun’s numinous photographs replicate at a viral pace. In Religion Pits, 2021, a crucifix looks to concurrently deteriorate as it types, its sundry fragments and intersecting planes breaking off though increasing. Other pics, these kinds of as Pop Tunes and My Recent Party, the two 2021, contain strobe-like gradient bands, evoking beams of light-weight being transmitted at a quick rate. Two additional recent is effective, Seasonal Arpeggio and Large Good Property, the two 2022, look as even though they were being serially produced—like a procession of traveling-buttress beams, lambent ribbons replicate throughout their surfaces. Although Mun’s manufacturer of formalism is rather common, his artwork still manages to deliver a wealthy and luminous potential.
— Alexandra Drexelius
