Perhaps this work in colored pencil and Indian inksigned in 2022 by Glen Baxter (1944, Leeds), testifies better than any other to the frenzied game of ping-pong that takes place permanently in the sports hall of art history. This cinematographically framed drawing revisits a masterpiece, Target (1961). Everyone has at least glimpsed this colored target once in their life, revealing the work of Jasper Johns (1930, Augusta), composed of a superposition of canvas, encaustic and pieces of newspaper. Throughout his career, the American artist has never made a secret of the mechanics inherent in his plastic approach: using a trivial object and transforming it into an almost abstract representation. In his hands, the real becomes impenetrable, even hermetic. Everything has to be placed in a context, that of an American pre-pop art wishing to give the answer to abstract expressionism, a movement worked by a desire to distribute the medium in a homogeneous way on the canvas, “all-over» , in response to the imposition of a single visual center. In The Artist’s Lifea small book he has just published with La Pierre d’Alun editions, Glen Baxter makes this confession: “I spent five years at art school and was fascinated by Giorgio De Chirico’s paintings and Max Ernst’s collage novels. At this time, the school focused primarily on abstraction, and most of the work pastiche American Abstract Expressionism. […]. It felt like I was the right person in the wrong place.” By recontextualizing Johns’ square painting some 60 years later in a vertical composition under which he inscribed «Signs of tension at the Jasper Johns retrospective», Baxter rematerializes the concentric circles, thus bringing them to their status as nothing real targets. Thanks to a delicious touch of humor, the Briton, who is close to Monty Python, gives back the advantage to surrealism.
