Perilous Night 1982

Jasper Johns made this large painting, Perilous Night, out of encaustic and collage on canvas. It's a piece where the making is so present; you can practically feel Johns layering hot wax and embedding objects. Check out the left panel. The surface is alive with grays and purples, swirling like smoke, punctuated by these almost violent, scratchy lines. Then your eye hits those dismembered arms, reaching out from the right side of the canvas, like props from a surreal drama. The physicality of the paint, thick and almost sculptural in places, creates a tension. Is he trying to conceal or reveal? And what about that ghostly shirt floating below? Johns' use of encaustic links him to the ancient world, like the Fayum mummy portraits, yet his incorporation of everyday objects puts him squarely in the realm of Pop Art. This tension between past and present, abstraction and representation, is what makes his work so endlessly compelling.