Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present Kelley Johnson's second solo exhibition with the gallery, Illusive Memories of Space. Johnson's presentation expands upon his hard-edge geometric paintings that center around the use of the grid. Despite this constraint, the artist continues to develop an infinite variety of formal constructions within this structure.

Johnson employs this rationalist approach in an intuitive manner. His process is slow and meditative, building each composition gradually in built-up repetitive layers of lines that form geometric patterns. Each individual layer that sits on top of the next leaves a glimpse of the space underneath it creating a breathable space that fluctuates between surface and optical depth.

Throughout his practice, Johnson has tightened the spacing within the lines and intensified the contrasting colors between them, resulting in compositions that elicit striking optical vibrations. A sense of push and pull of shifting focal points from different levels within the paintings creates a visual tension that oscillates, pulsates, breathes, and contracts, opening up a dialogue between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space. The use of washes of transparent color, another development Johnson has incorporated into the smaller works on view, evokes Turneresque atmospheric spaces.

In contrast, others feel more voyeuristic, like peering through a window. The result manifests the resolution of logic and feeling, intellect and emotion. Johnson shows that our understanding of space and time can be as layered and shifting as the paintings' forms. Color, light, and form flatten and expand to create a visual interaction with time as the space morphs and changes in the image, bringing its viewer in and out of consciousness through a hypnotic experience. The viewer's perspective is constantly being redirected and led to focus on new vantage points. While simultaneously lost within the patterns in the painting, the viewer is evermore attuned to the structures that create time and space.

Kelley Johnson (b. 1973, Houston, Texas) holds an MFA from Indiana University, a BFA from Parsons School of Design, and a Yale University Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellow. Recent solo exhibitions of the artist's work have been on view at Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami, FL; Hollywood Art and Culture Center, Hollywood, FL; Freight & Volume Gallery, New York, NY; Arts and Leisure Gallery, New York, New York.

Recent public art commissions include Art in Public Places Virgin Voyages Terminal, Miami, FL; FedEx Headquarters, Miami International Airport; Untitled Art Fair, Miami Beach; Locust Projects, Public Art Installation at the Grove at Grand Bay, Coconut Grove, FL. Notable collections include Perez Art Museum, Art in Public Places MD, Related Group, UBS Bank, and Daum Museum of Contemporary Art.