Michael St. John, Three New Paintings

Through August in our window vitrine on Railroad Street (just off Main Street) in North Canaan, CT

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Statement by Millree Hughes

Michael St John’s work uses imagery from consumer culture and undercuts it with visual and literary puns that often draw from art history. He is a plasmateur, a morphologist of Art, and a re-presenter, re-creating painting in unfamiliar ways.

The first piece of Michael's I ever saw was back in the 90s. It was a cinder block that he had iced as if it was a cake. It was a joke about impasto paint handling; about how cake can turn out like concrete.

Michael frequently treats process as if it was narrative. A series of works that are ostensibly about race, for instance, are also about color in a purely formal way.

St. John loves the everyday. The news, the scandal sheets, the familiar. His intellectual curiosity is essentially American, but the content of his work comes out of seeing everything from the perspective of the artist; A higher calling that considers everything; the paint, the style of representation, the edge, and how Modern painters have addressed these issues. He then reimagines these considerations.

The three pieces we’re showing together become a painterly meditation on degrees of blocked light; An amusing inversion for a medium obsessed with light.