Dion Johnson: Radiance

Radiance

In his gallery debut, Dion Johnson will exhibit paintings that continue to combine his use of innovative painterly and graphic techniques combined with recognizable, everyday subject matter.

Johnson builds up his surfaces with translucent glazes, drips, and smears. Caught between the layers and peering out from behind the smears are images of architectural drawings, mechanical diagrams and carefully painted flowers and birds, at once naturally rendered and artificially frozen in space. Johnson’s palette of in-between colors conveys a beautiful atmospheric haze that at the same time evokes a world of banal pastels that reinforces the sense of a retro middle American dream that has slid into the distant past.

In these new works Johnson has allowed his paintings to open up, leaving expansive areas of modulated color where the mind can drift and float before returning to the clusters of specific subject matter that float between the abstract layers.

Dion Johnson has exhibited at Rebecca Ibel Gallery, Columbus, OH, Stux Gallery, New York, Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica. The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, James Kelly Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM and Bill Maynes Gallery, New York. He is a graduate of Claremont University, Claremont, CA