Focusing on the ordinary objects and familiar two-dimensional images that we encounter in everyday life—images so conventional that we rarely stop to consider their aesthetic qualities—Jasper Johns transformed motifs such as the American flag, maps, letters, numbers, and the “target” seen in this work into subjects for painting by removing them from their original contexts and functions.
Instantly recognizable to anyone, the target becomes a motif in which the pattern itself takes precedence over meaning or function. Against a red background, concentric rings of blue and yellow expand outward from the center, creating a composition that draws attention to its visual structure rather than to the practical purpose of a target. Repeatedly depicted throughout the series and based on the standard target used in archery, the image became deeply embedded in viewers’ memories through repetition. Standing before these works, we may ask whether we are looking at a painting of a target or at the sign of a target itself. In moving back and forth between art and sign, the work challenges us to reconsider the very act of seeing.
In this painting, bands of green, orange, and purple—the complementary colors of red, blue, and yellow—appear across the surface of the target. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the target was first painted in green, orange, and purple, and only later overpainted with red, blue, and yellow. Through these layered colors, the act of perception itself becomes one of the central subjects of the work.
Of the twenty-two paintings in Johns’s Target series, only the first two combine the target motif with plaster casts, creating works that possess a dual character as both two-dimensional paintings and three-dimensional objects. Thereafter, Johns focused exclusively on painted targets. Approximately half of the series, including the present work, employ primary and complementary colors, while the remaining works are rendered in monochromatic palettes of green, gray, white, and black. Varying greatly in scale, the series demonstrates Johns’s sustained exploration of how a single motif can shift in appearance and meaning through repetition and variation.