"Marks of varying tempo, weight and direction caress and bruise and elaborate and disrupt and erode the familiar forms of everyday objects."
A flurry of staccato brushstrokes and phantom drips of monochrome hues materialize the recognizable form of the number 8, powerfully encapsulating the philosophical premise of Jasper Johns’s conceptual conceit. Executed in 1959 at Johns’s legendary Front Street studio, Figure 8 is an intimately scaled and monochromatic example of his iconic Figures, or single numerals in generic typography isolated in a rectangular field, which continued in various sizes and colors from 1955 through to the 1970s. In this series, Johns articulated the distinct shape of each numeral while maintaining the surface’s uniform color and texture, creating an image of a numeral that neither asserts itself nor totally disappears, thus disrupting its conventional function as a sign. Situated at the threshold of Abstract Expressionism and Pop, Johns’s quintessential representation of the singular number radically interrogates the complicated relationships between form and meaning. By abrogating the boundaries between painting and sculpture, sign, and referent in order to challenge our preconceptions about its status as an aesthetic object, Figure 8 is a physical and seminal manifestation of what Johns considers the most successful examples of his art: “The canvas is object, the paint is object, and object is object.’’ (The artist quoted in: David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, 2001, p. 167)
"[Numerals] seemed to me pre-formed, conventional, depersonalized, factual, exterior elements. I’m interested in things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality. I’m interested in things which suggest things which are, rather than in judgments. The most conventional thing, the most ordinary thing -it seems to me that those things can be dealt with without having to judge them; they seem to me to exist as clear facts, not involving aesthetic hierarchy."
Beginning in the mid-1950s with the first of his celebrated and dream-inspired Flag paintings, Johns adopted a markedly objective style that stressed the complex semiotics of art as object and art as practice. Focusing on quotidian “signs” and “symbols,” Johns simultaneously probed art’s ability to communicate and the viewer’s ability to perceive. From this starting point, all aspects of Johns’s art of the 1950s and 1960s focused on this fundamental intellectual inquiry: medium, pictorial language, and execution all served to engage the artist and the viewer in the phenomena of artistic expression. Numerals first appeared in Jasper Johns’ work in Construction with Toy Piano from 1954 and would remain a central motif of the artist’s works for decades to come, more so than any other subject or series in his career. By 1960, Johns had developed four discrete formats through which to limit himself to the ten Arabic numerals in his painting process: Figures, Numbers, Ten Numbers, and 0 through 9. Fascinated by the “ready-made” design of numbers that required no compositional invention, Johns especially favored this prosaic subject for its status as “pre-formed, conventional, de-personalized, factual, exterior elements.” (The artist quoted in: David Sylvester, Jasper Johns Drawings, London,1974, p. 7)
By harnessing the connotative power of a sign so familiar as to be immediately recognized, Johns removed all inclination on the part of the viewer to discern or associate a narrative in his work, leaving only a primordial impulse to appreciate Figure 8 for its enchanting physicality. Johns’s emphasis on objectivity here is heightened by his use of monochromatic gray, through which he achieves the ultimate act of negation to declare the fundamental objecthood of his paintings. Divested of color, the daubs and brushstrokes made by Johns across the surface of 8 become even more profound, contrasting only in subtle variances of tonality and gesture: as David Sylvester wrote about Johns’s paintings, "marks of varying tempo, weight and direction caress and bruise and elaborate and disrupt and erode the familiar forms of everyday objects" (Exh. Cat., London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Jasper Johns' Flags 1955-1994, p. 12). Furthermore, through Johns' thick impasto, the painted number appears almost abstracted, simultaneously morphing between the familiar and unfamiliar. In the heavily worked surface of Figure 8, the viewer can indulge the eye and delight simply in the sheer beauty of Johns' chosen medium.
“The canvas is object, the paint is object, and object is object.’’
Figure 8 is a precious memento of Johns’s ultimate philosophical project, which destabilized the boundaries between an object and its artistic representation to form one of the most famous chapters of postwar art history. Contrary to the emotional outpourings of his forebears in the New York School, Johns pursued phenomena as his subjects, each of which were so familiar as to be almost invisible, approaching them with a thoughtful reserve that befitted their inherent neutrality. The dichotomy between presentation and representation - here, between image and number - draws Johns' viewer into the drama of the meanings of his paintings, lending them more physical and intellectual resonance. Johns was an artist radically concerned with revelation; by using subject matter as the pretext for his investigation into the ontology of painting itself, he revealed to the viewer something radically new about the surrounding world that we normally take for granted, whether it was the act of creation and perception itself, or the formal qualities of numerals, as we see with enlightening clarity in Figure 8.
