Target
Jasper Johns
JASPER JOHNS, 1961. ENCAUSTIC AND NEWSPAPER ON CANVAS.
In order to create something new, Johns had to destroy all that he made before. An abstract expressionist up until the mid 1950s, Jasper Johns looked for a way to move beyond the movement and found it in simple, recurring motifs, but before he progressed with the new artistic career that would make his name, he destroyed all the canvases that he had produced before. The target was the perfect image for an artist looking for explicit meaning. Instantly recognisable, pre-existing, simple in it’s formation but open in its interpretation, from 1955 to 1961, John produced dozens of paintings and drawings featuring the target. There is something quintessentially American about John’s targets, tapping into a primary color Pop feeling that below it’s light joyousness perhaps hides something sinister. Too, for all of his attempt to abandon the Abstract Expressionist movement he had worked in, its influence is visible in the brushstrokes and the unusual application of encaustic, a hot wax mixed with pigment, that make up the image, hiding visual depth and the proof of a human hand in each stroke.