Lester Johnson
Martha Jackson Gallery
Lester Johnson showed a large number of recent paintings at the Martha Jackson Gallery that bug me. It’s not because they are representational either, since the real tension is not so much between representational and pure painterly values as between fine art and an almost historicizing kind of funkiness. Let me explain. There are obvious similarities with Léger, including crowds of city people with tubular limbs and bowler hats, and even an attitude toward the figure as a manipulable mannequin. Yet there is an embraced clumsiness in the assembly of groups and a deliberate spatial inconsistency