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About me
I have noticed that, on several occasions, when I have attempted to present Johannes’ artistic talents, what has been mostly notable is the capacity to develop, in his abstract search, a result strongly influenced by the “Caribbean and Antillean color palate.” I am convinced that such affirmations are extremely limiting: in effect, delving across the entire artistic realm they are easily decipherable, which is why the final deductions are all that more complex. First of all, it is essential to point out the fact that Johannes is a true self-taught artist who found his “public vocation” at an older age.
His conceptual searches, contrary to most artists in which their concepts originate from similarities to past artworks and their current academics, are developed and stem from his own life experiences: from an early age, Johannes has endured difficult experiences, complex and intense, due to family relations which tested the limits of violence, which always left markings and scars (which are currently still quite present internally), all this blends into an innate and focused sensibility towards large scale modern world conflicts. Obligated to work from a young age, he has traversed a multitude of activities, from waiter, hospital assistant, newspaper salesman and commercial pilot. He has realized these experiences while spanning the globe, thereby incorporating an international component to his vision and knowledge. All of this was always influenced positively by an incessant pleasure of the figurative realistic sketch, utilizing pencil as an expression of his innate skill and expressive capability, driven to delineate particular portraits, figures and still life to capture. It is important and just to emphasize that Johannes is an artist that can draw very well and knows, at any moment, that with a strong graphic expression, he can realistically represent what he sees. His first experiences with oil color, brushes and thereby landscapes or abstract themes is a legendary trajectory, which is quick, incredibly interesting and suggestive.
I am almost convinced that, for him, it is an almost unconscious proximity, but in order to comprehend and consequently identify recognizable parameters, I would like to parallel him to the “Pointillist” period. Impressionism linked to landscapes and representative environments, placing upon the canvas pure untainted colors, through pointed marks and not brushstrokes. These are works display a will to forget his own past, the search to elicit the dream of his future, and the positive explosion of the pleasure of discovering his own natural capacity to utilize the pictorial technique. It is a convergence full of luminosity where the appreciation of the renovation of the hues imprints onto the retina of the observer. Once seduced, here is where Johannes begins to delve into a technique and expression which will progress to a more evolved search, identifiable, always trying to comprehend us, in an advanced divisionism where the traditional dots transforms into convulsive filaments that overlap, and for now, become “intertwined tracings”. Now this is another important defining moment, if the pointillism connects to its positivism movement, then the new divisionist formula transforms into a form of antithesis. Johannes no longer copies what he sees, his art morphs toward an intellectual function with realistic forms and colors; in this manner he renounces the hope of finding his work already created in the outside world and in so, draws his true art distanced from the falsehood of reality. The reevaluation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy by which worldly phenomenon is considered superficial is now clear, while the lone artistic contemplation obliges us to confront contact with the truth. The moment in which Johannes finds refuge in his artistic / natural introversion is interpreted in his diverse collections with idiosyncrasy and varied truths, accentuating the symbolic and expressive meanings toward social and tragic dilemmas. At this point, he continues to assimilate scientific attributes, that instead of redirecting towards healing the downtrodden plight of the masses, he transforms his medium into a meditation and understanding of exploitation and destruction (the most prominent examples are the “Children of War”, “We are Many” or “Woman or Object” Series). In his vast internal world, appears his convoluted youth, with all the hope and unattainable wishes demonstrated in “My Blue World”.
The dreams remain unified with reverence to the incitement towards his own growth, towards the almost obligated condition of exhausting his emotions, his rage and his suffering. (“The Monsters of Quixote”). During this same period of great tension and internal angst, his colors begin to attenuate and that which superficially identified as Caribbean and Antillean changes, through the homogeneity and prevalence of grays and contrasts between black and white (the color only serves to emphasize the neutral), defining another achievement in Johannes’ pictorial journey. There is a delicate approximation to a realistic symbolic style, the divisionist “cross” elongates and loses its organic, repetitive and continuous essence, now it approaches the figurative and violently manifests with great specificity to delineate the desolate landscape of New York City with the “Metropolis” series. Here the ordinance, that govern tangible space, convulsively contort overcoming even the limits of the white canvas, they divide, and they become flat sculptures, propagating towards the accessible, scraps of wood become art and in this frenzy, with speed of execution, the artwork transforms in its entirety not only stimulating contemplation of the image itself but also its particular sound and fragrance.
In all certainty, the conceptual intensity, the crude and violent expression, with the artistic style of “Outsider-Art”, obliges us to enter vigorously and with absolute authenticity into a new era, that for many is yet unknown, however I have had the great fortune of its acquaintance. It is a series of great works, meters and meters of squared cloth, where everything becomes complex, from the mounting onto unique frames, which oblige him to paint on the floor of his studio. These works present a monochromatic background over which the forms freely intertwine, they blend and weave to give life to figures and hidden geometric forms, they move in an imaginary setting with expressive violence and crude style representing intimacy, fear and the indefinite, fantastic unconscious. I believe that the moment of the highest projection of our own thought and internal self, here the individuality of an unconventional artist prevails, he risks his personal existence where he can direct his particular emotions, his vital energy and original ideas already detached from a conventional frame. Now, Johannes’ work is revealed as an area of contemplation and active enclosure, where fantasy reigns supreme, through which educated symbolic attributes are easily perceived in his tracings… superfluous to reality… the enchantment is portrayed as unreal and this unrealistic notion of continuously evolving art….a reflection of the artist himself.
Irene & Luciano Rossi