Aaron Johnson

Aaron Johnson’s painting process is his unique version of action painting: applying washes of paint and letting the colours flow into raw canvas. He lets the paint find its own path on the canvas, in a process he likens to discovery rather than creation. The result is a lucid field of colours, with luminescent figures morphing and disappearing into each other. Later, he will add in details – a dot here, a line there – building up the abstract forms to reveal the lurking figures.

Inspired by surrealism and sixties psychedelia, Johnson’s paintings take you on a trip. Usually to very far-fetched places, like Black Hole Party (2022). The painting is littered with dots, some are eyes and some are stars. The bodies crushed together under the immense gravity of the black hole are imagined to be dancing, rather than dying – as you might expect from the title. Like so many of Johnson’s paintings, there is an ever-present tension between the harmonic and the grotesque, and a fine line between lovers and monsters. His artistic practice is about revealing possibilities for both paint and humanity.