Usuyuki

For Jasper Johns, art is an intellectual exercise and he has been called the “zen master” of contemporary American art. He began to exhibit in New York in the 1950s and, with Robert Rauschenberg, his work was credited with showing a way beyond the abstraction and expressionism of an earlier generation. Often categorized as a Pop artist for his use of familiar objects and common materials—flags, numbers, targets, maps, and newspapers—Johns challenges the invisibility of conventional ideas and images, that is, how we don’t actually “see” things we see all the time. Early in his career, he began experimenting with traditional printmaking techniques to produce innovative works. “Usuyuki,” a Japanese term meaning “light snow,” is the title given to a series of prints the artist created in the early 1980s and suggests the works invoke a snow’s ephemeral beauty. Made on handmade paper to mimic a collage of newsprint scraps, Usuyuki both invites and frustrates deciphering. Overlaid with crosshatching, the complex linear pattern creates an illusion of three dimensions, while the underlying rectangular grid and brightly colored, circular accents reinforce the paper’s flatness. This spatial ambiguity, coupled with Johns’s carefully modulated tones and the newsprint collage, creates a work of exquisite calculation.