Chris Johanson, Wednesday Just Before Sunset, 2011; acrylic and latex on paper with sawdust; 18 x 23 3/4 in.; courtesy the artist and Altman Siegel SF.

Placed just inside the door, a simple field of colorful shapes with its title scratched in diminutive white letters along the bottom introduces Chris Johanson’s solo exhibition at Altman Siegel. Coalescing the work’s elementary shapes into a response to a moment in time, the title—Wednesday Just Before Sunset (2011)—presents the work as a sort of phenomenal landscape. This initial insight into Johanson’s way of transforming sensory impressions into an abstract record of everyday life provides a useful key for approaching the exhibition.

Hey There, That’s You, a small and paint-spattered mirror adhered to painted wood, places the viewer (by way of reflection) in the center of an energetic plane of colors. The viewer becomes part of the work, and though it’s easy to dismiss the piece as gimmicky, it’s equally easy to feel genuinely included in this work and the environment Johanson created in the entire gallery. The arrangement of sculptures in the front room is practically a three-dimensional diagram of the outside world as filtered through the artist’s psyche: there’s a moon, flowers, a billboard-like landscape as well as another composition that purports to have something to do with humans, planets and universal time. It is familiar territory and a personal invitation to view things differently.

 
Chris Johanson, left Hey There, That's You,  2011; acrylic, latex and mirror on wood; 45 1/2 x 54 in.; installation view on right; courtesy the artist and Altman Siegel SF. 

One almost expects to find irony in the works’ bright colors and simple yet ambitious titles; clichéd sentiments seem to abound in Johanson’s exhibiton. Instead, the artist’s unequivocal sincerity in responding to the world through color and abstraction evokes a Modernist sensibility with its unschooled aesthetic and  universalist convictions. If viewers manage to doubt Johanson’s sincerity after walking through the show, they need only refer to the gallery’s press release, for which the artist composed an original poem (excerpted here):

the ground that makes plants and life
you can see it certainly is a living world
and you are part of it
beating with it right now

There is a sound that is all around made from everything
it is a gentle lullaby
it puts you to sleep
after a day with its imperfections and things to be grateful for
it will swim around with the beat of your heart as you let the day go and slow everything down

And I don’t know
not you, not me
Everything, Everything

And there is more ahead and more behind
because time goes both ways for all time

Chris Johanson, Easy Listening, 2011; acrylic on paper; 18 x 23 3/4 in.; installation view courtesy the artist and Altman Siegel, SF.

For the more cynical among us (I mean me), the relentless naïveté teeters between refreshing and exasperating. Fortunately, a few well-placed witty moments—for instance, hanging a work titled Easy Listening (2011) behind the gallery’s front desk—help to nudge the exhibition closer to the endearing side of the line.

Passing back through the front room, one may glimpse a reflection of movement in that small mirror of Hey There That’s You. Seen again from afar, the work reflects the viewer among the other works in the space. Such plays with reflection and environment further the idea of interconnectedness that forms the heart of Johanson’s exhibition. Standing in front of the mirror brings viewers into the work’s picture plane, while stepping away places one in a different dimension of colors and “energy that is all around”—part of something larger, perhaps. It follows that the same is true after leaving the gallery.

Chris Johanson, Energy That Is All Around, 2011; acrylic and latex on paper with sawdust; 18 x 23 3/4 in.; courtesy the artist and Altman Siegel, SF.