The paintings of Ynez Johnston can be hard to place. Her work contains ornate patterns, invented glyphs and maplike diagrams that depict no known territory. These can be playful; they can also channel mystical states. In a forthcoming catalog on the artist, the writer Suzanne Muchnic notes: “The sense of time and place that radiates from her work is elusive.”
Yet Johnston was a product of 20th-century California. Born in Berkeley in 1920, she moved to Los Angeles in 1949, where she associated with figures like the printmaker June Wayne.
Johnston, however, steered clear of the midcentury movements for which Southern California is best known (hard-edge abstraction, assemblage and Pop), instead devising a painterly language that drew from sources like Tibetan thangkas and Mayan temple carvings. Though her work is in the collections of major museums, she remains little known.
This show, titled “In Search of the Oracle,” aims to reinsert her into the regional consciousness. Nearly two dozen works are on view, covering a six-decade period beginning in the 1950s. (She died in 2019.) These pieces reveal an artist who experimented with materials, including fabricating idiosyncratic sculpture out of wood and bronze.
The most remarkable aspect here is the dexterous use of pattern in her paintings. Fields of color are laced by meticulous calligraphic designs. “Village Along Tropical Coast,” made around 1950, shows a fantastical settlement tucked within a red border. Its tight mass of cupolas, arches, towers and other geometric forms practically vibrates off the paper. It could have been made 500 years ago — or only yesterday. CAROLINA A. MIRANDA