Opening 23 september 2010, h. 6 p.m.

The 2010-2011 exhibition season at Guido Costa Projects opens Thursday, September 23 at 18.00 with an exhibition of new works by American Tom Johnson.

The exhibition continues the creative trajectory that the young New York artist introduced in his first solo exhibition in Turin in 2007. Now Johnson's expression is articulated within the confines of strict black and white and in a balance between visionary and metaphysical minimalist rigor.

In his new show Tom Johnson seems to want to focus on a reduction to primary forms, distilling his preoccupations into an ideal and yet artificial, or theatrical, representation . Even sculpture, the backbone of his first exhibition in Turin, is here reduced to its essence as representation, pure two-dimensionality.

The exhibition is made of five drawings, all large, all the result of an intense dialogue, taken to its limit, between the white of the paper and the many shades of the black charcoal. These are works where you feel strongly the complexity of the result, filled with both the doubt and the ease of subjecting the idea to the medium. The slowness of virtuosity and the speed of impulsiveness nourish each other, almost as if only because of their difference.

On the paper we find strange bedfellows; a certain quoting mannerism, a vaguely perverse affection for the minor arts, but also the pleasure in making the all-resolving Expressionist gesture and the reduced forms of early moderism. These works are deliberately unresolved, as if their lives depended on a secret beyond the gestures made here.

They are stories that stop at least one step away from a happy ending, resisting the completion of the fable. Their dynamism, born from an exacting choice of solids and voids and a sophisticated analysis of the space, comes from exactly this metaphysics of incompleteness, one which denies any synthesizing peace, whether formal or conceptual.

Rather than representing something, Tom Johnson stages something, opening up a vision of becoming. This is confirmed by the very forms he chooses as cornerstones for his grammar: vaguely anthropomorphic forms, though governed more by geometry than biology. It is no coincidence that, as if a watermark, you can read in each of the works his past history as a radical performer, follower of a brutal linguistic alchemy, a kind of semiotic reductionism taken to the limits of cynicism and often very politically inncorrect.

In these, his new works, the artist seems to have wanted to carve out a fragment of wisdom, one fed by a long and thoughtful meditation and certainly one more reassuring because of its quiet repetive, yet self-aware, gesture.

For this reason, above all, the small cycle of works has the flavour of inevitability: it had to be, this is his form and vocation. it was on this very fine line between question and answer that his hand had to come to rest.

The exhibition of Tom Johnson will be open until 30 October 2010.

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Tom Johnson (New York City, 1966, lives and works in New York and Turin), was educated at Bard College in Annadale and regularly exhibits in the United States since 2000. In 2005 he participated in the exhibition Greater New York at PS1 in New York and The Pantagruel Syndrome at Castello di Rivoli in Turin. In 2009 in The Front Room at the Contemporary Museum St. Louis. Tom Johnson is represented by CANADA Gallery, New York, and Guido Costa Projects, Turin.