Untitled 2001

This is an untitled print by Jasper Johns. Look at the surface, it’s really alive with different marks and a limited palette of blues and grays. You get the feeling that Johns is not just depicting something, but really thinking through the process of artmaking itself. The way the images are laid out, it’s almost like looking through different windows. A field of energetic, scratched lines and mysterious shapes forms the central plane, with the additional imagery as receding viewpoints. I am really drawn to the contrast of the freehand, scribbled quality of the etched lines against the photographic image. The eye travels across the surface, jumping from one element to the next, piecing together the narrative. Johns’s work has this amazing ability to keep you guessing. Like Rauschenberg, he challenges our assumptions about what art is and what it can be. In this way, Johns seems to be asking us to slow down, to look closer, and to embrace the ambiguity of it all.