Jasper Johns: Works on Paper, 1994-2007, is an exhibit of only 17 works, but seeing it is well worth the trek to Youngstown.

Johns has defined an era in American art. His work is the touchstone that puts everything right, the anchor, the sail and the vessel that have carried us through often churning art world seas that have too often in the last few decades offered up a great deal of shock and not much awe.

Happily, his own work offers us a seemingly limitless bounty of exceptions. His touch is sure and fluid, his wit both subtle and profound and his eye is still the best in the business.

Johns’ art builds upon Cubism, Dada and Surrealism. His early work combined a serious concern for the craft of painting and an incredibly elegant way of handling paint with an emphasis on commonplace subject matter, a strategy that tended to force viewer attention on the painting process itself.

Johns’ series of flags and targets, numbers, maps, rule and circle devices managed to combine representation and abstraction in an insightful and innovative synthesis that had been long and vainly sought by leading artists of the Abstract Expressionist
movement.

The simplicity and familiarity of such things as flags and numbers piqued viewer interest in both the motivation and the process of the artist, who once explained that ”there may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists.”

Later, Johns began to layer his paintings with what some took to be hidden meanings. But more often than not, the message has been his admiration for other artists, like Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, the two opposite poles of 20th-century art.

Johns often turns to other masters for inspiration: Paul Klee’s stick figures, Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross.

Like Duchamp, Johns is attracted to visual puns and zingers (though in Johns’ case, instead of zingers, he gives us slow burns), as well as trick images from perceptual psychology: the duck/rabbit drawing or the young girl/old woman image.

Along with these is the positive-negative space lesson, presenting to us what appears to be a vase, only to have it resolve in its surrounding negative space into two profiles.

As Johns describes it, he creates ”an image that when looked at becomes something else and there’s no in between.” We see one image, then the other, but never stably as both or as anything in between.

This disconnects the viewer from preconceptions, and enables him to see two possibilities, but with no way to reconcile either, which then moves the viewer toward seeing life more ambiguously.

In this exhibit of works on paper, Johns further explores the use of ambiguity and the merging of two perspectives (or perceptions) into one deceptively simple image.

For instance, his Untitled (2006) ink-on-plastic painting (No. 17 in the catalog) shows a dark circle hovering just above dead center, and over a loop that we can see is formed by drooping from either side of the composition a length of string, creating what architects call a catenary arch. It’s the kind of arch one sees on suspension bridges when cables are looped between stanchions.

This loop, however, seems both in and out of the composition, floating above it, yet describing volume within it. up close one is taken in by the lovely brushwork and cryptic marks, not to mention the details of the tying and the ends of the string.

At a distance, however, the image takes on the appearance of a bare and distended belly, and the string disappears into the overall composition.

This is the kind of thing that Johns does that teaches us to look. what he’s hoping is that the viewer will stop and consider what’s before him, rather than pass over it, as so many gallery visitors are prone to do.

Untitled (1994) is an ink-on-paper composition that incorporates a curious octopuslike figure with arms and legs fanning out from a featureless head, making a linear body with little detail, except toes, fingers and wobbly looking echoes of the original limb shapes. it sits on the page above the Klee-like stick figures that are also a recurring motif in Johns’ work.

The figures are schematic renderings of artists wielding brushes, which first appeared in the margin of the 1982 ink-on-plastic version of Perilous Night. They stand for the persistence of creativity even in doubt and despair, according to an immensely informative essay by Roberta Bernstein in the late Kirk Varnedoe’s splendid catalog for Jasper Johns, A Retrospective, for the Museum of Modern Art in 1997.

The octopus-man is a figure found in Picasso’s Fall of Icarus (1958), a large mural commissioned by UNESCO for its Paris headquarters. it is the artist’s surrogate for Everyman. In Icarus, it represents the tragic flaw of hubris and imagination that leads to his demise, according to Bernstein.

There’s also a figure superimposed by Sengai’s Circle, Triangle, and Square. Sengai was an 18th-century Japanese Zen master. the circle-triangle-square is Sengai’s picture of the universe. the circle represents the infinite, at the basis of all beings but itself formless. Humans endowed with senses and intellect demand tangible forms. hence, a triangle. the triangle is the beginning of all forms. Out of it first comes the square. A square is the triangle doubled. this doubling process goes on infinitely and we have the multiplicity of things, which Chinese philosophy calls ”the ten thousand things,” that is the universe.

In Johns’ 1994 ink on paper, these motifs are joined by an arrow, a ladder and partially inscribed circles that relate to an Untitled 1992-1995 encaustic on canvas, as well as to motifs drawn in reverse in a 1991 oil-on-canvas painting, Mirror’s Edge.

The ladder is from Picasso’s Minotaur Moving His House and it’s said to be a metaphor for the passage of time and space.

These elements are elaborated upon in an Untitled (1998) ink on paper glued to a backing sheet. to them, Johns has added a pair of silhouettes and a large cross.

An Untitled intaglio on paper from 2001 shows a photograph of Johns’ family, his father, grandfather, aunts and uncles and a grandmother who died young.

Johns juxtaposes this image with one of a spiral galaxy, which is a link to works by Barnett Newman, whose 1949 painting Galaxy specifically refers to the form, says Bernstein, while several of his black-and-white drawings that Johns references in other paintings are visually and thematically related to the spiral galaxy.

He has done this since he appropriated the American flag and the Target paintings. by using imagery he already knows, he then becomes free to go on to something new and transform the imagery into something of his own.

Johns is an artist notorious for relishing his privacy, but by using imagery that can be deciphered and understood, he shows us that he’s willing to share, but only if we’re willing to make the effort to understand.

Dorothy Shinn writes about art and architecture for the Akron Beacon Journal. Send information to her at the Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640 or dtgshinn@neo.rr.com.