Upon entry to the National Galleries of Scotland through the Main Entrance, you will meet eye-to-eye with a generous-sized canvas covered in abstract shapes and swirls, dominated by gloomy hues of blue illuminated by glowing reds and yellows. A labyrinthine landscape of indistinct forms, A Point in Time, the blurb states, shows Johnstone’s response to the horrors of war by focusing on the unsettling and the untameable.
Johnstone’s “primordial landscape” fuses the overwhelmingly foreign and the suffocatingly familiar in its composition provoking disgust in both the outside world and the human body.
The shapes that dominate the canvas are allegedly inspired by the landscape of the Scottish border -yet the jagged rocks and twisting canals are more reminiscent of an entrapping, underground labyrinth than rolling hills. Numerous tunnels that provide countless visual points of focus, whilst deep, enclosed spaces seem to stretch. Dominated by various shades of melancholic blue, the piece resembles a chilling maze of suffocating underground passages.
And just as this cold, natural world suffocates and unnerves, it forces our focus onto the corporeal.
There is something unsettlingly corporeal about the soft, fleshy red shapes that protrude from gloomy crevices, or the jagged spikes sprouting like teeth. The piece makes the internal and the familiar just as unnerving as the human body becomes repulsive and suffocating. With abstract shapes taking on unsettling new forms, this Rorschach test reminds us that our subconscious is an oppressive force. The threat of entrapment becomes not only physical but psychological, too.
Against the proud red wall of the calming National Gallery, such an intense and anguished piece cuts an alarming shape. Yet it is precisely this disruption and alienation of a comfortable space that makes Johnstone’s expression of suffocation during the interwar period so impactful.
“Scottish National Gallery, dusk” by byronv2 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.