Jasper Johns' early artworks question how we look at, perceive and make art. He does not distinguish between subject and object in his work, or art and life for that matter. In his eyes they are both the same thing. Johns believes that we should not look upon a painting as a representation or illusion but as an object with its own reality.
Like the forerunners of British Pop Art, Johns was influenced by Dada ideas, in particular the 'readymades' (found objects) of Marcel Duchamp, whose bottle racks and bicycle wheels challenged the definition of the art object.
However, it was not 'found objects' that Johns introduced as a subject for his paintings, but ‘found images’ - flags, targets, letters and numbers - and it was this iconography of familiar signs that appealed to Pop. He saw them as "pre-formed, conventional, depersonalised, factual, exterior elements."
Johns' depersonalized images provided an antidote to the obscure personal abstraction of late Abstract Expressionism. His use of such neutral icons offered him a subject that was immediately recognisable but so ordinary that it left him free to work on other levels. His subjects provided him with a structure upon which he could explore the visual and physical qualities of his medium. The results were a careful balance between representation and abstraction.
Johns painted in encaustic, an archaic medium that dates from the first century which fuses pigment in hot wax. He combined encaustic with newspaper collage to create a seductive expanse of paint where his sensitive mark-making articulates the surface of the work. His fascination with the overall unity of the surface plane in a picture places him in a tradition that stretches back through Cubism and Cézanne to Chardin.
Johns' art plays with visual ideas that have layers of meaning and communicate on various levels. It is both sensual and cerebral - an art about art and the way we relate to it.