The directness, joy and accessibility of John's rich, surprising colour and clean shapes go hand in hand with the subtlety and sophistication of the relationships he created between these elements. In each picture he made a world the viewer can inhabit, in both mind and feeling. Each gesture is a shape and each shape a gesture, controlled but permanently fresh. As a result, one experiences each frank and open picture as if in the process of its being painted.
John's painting became steadily more structured as the years passed. Increased discipline enriched his vision. The more densely physical his carefully organised paintings became, the more his individual forms were liberated, becoming active, almost multi-role actors in a pictorial drama. Though literally static, each form seems to partake in a complex interplay that is strikingly alive. John insists on absolute order, yet also on absolute openness.
Each picture invites scrutiny of its closest details. The mind of the artist can be discerned in meticulous decisions of masking, of touch, of layering and of perfect judgement of the near or actual abutment of interactive shapes. Thus even at their grandest John's paintings are somehow unusually intimate. In many medium to smaller sized pictures it is almost as if the perfectionist handwork of a Ben Nicholson, acutely sensitive to the minutest variations in depth and of lovingly-worked texture, is fused with the painterly and instinctual boldness of New York School abstraction, without which John's art is inconceivable.
The quality of exposure that characterises John's art reaches a peak in the works of his last year. Bracingly reductive, these pictures are also rich in their exploration of extremes-density with fluidity, mass with space, dark with light, brutality with tenderness, the flat with the sculptural, severity with humour and the wisdom of accumulated knowledge with a courageous breaking out. Triumphing over the restrictions imposed on him by illness, John accentuates the sense of his presence, the gestures of the loaded brush performing a dance with the sgraffito lines made by screwdriver or chisel. Each action says "I am here" and brings us yet closer to this most affirmative of artists, who encourages each viewer to make and to live.
London
September, 2019
