Aaron Johnson "Freedom from Want"
57 STUX + HALLER Gallery
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In paintings that are glimmering, seductive, and emanating light, Johnson’s monsters are gruesome, sadistic, and spewing venom. This body of work is a bold reflection on the decaying excesses of our insatiable culture.
With obsessive enthusiasm, Johnson has delved deeper into his lexicon of Americana Grotesque and has plunged his fiendish monsters further into a theater of cosmic madness. These paintings invite us to binge upon an exquisitely detailed feast of severed heads, Uncle Sam monsters, sausage crucifixes, fried eagles, mashed guts, fuck-burgers, camel roast, mutant sea creatures, and oil oozing fresh from the rig. Lingering ghosts of a Rockwellian American idyll smile naively as the American dream boils over into an ecstatic hallucinatory nightmare. War machines, fueled by dog shit and the blood of Christ, churn across oil fields and battle fields, as the angel of death flies over with a cackle of furious laughter. As they reflect on the callous cruelty of war, the absurd intersection of religion and government, and the hell on earth that society thereby creates, these paintings come boldly forward from the artist’s admiration of past masters such as Goya, Bosch, Dieric Bouts, and Otto Dix. These works expose a desiring machine monster that consumes perpetually until there is nothing left to do but devour itself.
Media
Schedule
from September 15, 2011 to October 15, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-09-15 from 18:00 to 20:00