MELBOURNE.- Tolarno Galleries will present Tim Johnson’s new exhibition of paintings and sculptures, Universal Mind.

Floating realms, magic carpets, metaphysical fields, portals to the paranormal – Johnson’s cosmic canvases inspire otherworldly analogies for their dreamlike visual harmonies and esoteric iconography.

Captivating the eye, stimulating the mind and awakening the soul, his syncretic compositions are structured with figures, objects and symbols derived from an eclectic array of sources, histories and traditions.

Collaboration has been a cornerstone of Johnson’s practice throughout his 55-year career, and his latest accomplice is Paul Rhodes, a fellow artist at Lennox Street Studios in Newtown and a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Sydney.

The two met six months ago when Johnson went to investigate the source of some jazz music Rhodes was playing in his studio. They got talking about various topics – Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, the Book of Revelations – and eventually Rhodes suggested they make a work together.

“It was Paul’s idea to paint the Book of Revelations, but it’s a subject matter I’ve returned to several times in my career because it’s just so rich in imagery,” says Johnson.

“I’m fascinated from a philosophical point of view, regarding my own destiny as a human being, and also because of what it has to say about the future and end times,” he says.

Revelations 2024 is a dynamic mind map of motifs anchored by Rhodes’ menagerie of heavenly – and not so heavenly – creatures drawn in pen and ink and coloured with acrylic paint.

These include a pink, seven-headed beast with a demonic blue rider, a red, seven-headed dragon with wings, a tail and talons to terrify, a chorus of figures with frogs coming out of their mouths, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, dubbed ‘Dorothy’, ‘Famine’, ‘My Little Pony’ and ‘Death’.

Around these spiky graphic incursions, Johnson has painted a softer, pastel-toned atmosphere replete with references drawn from East and West, including Buddhist pagodas, William Blake’s Urizen from The Ancient of Days, Hieronymus Bosch’s St John the Evangelist on Patmos (depicted in the act of writing the Book of Revelations), and clusters of angels, some with trumpets.

The pair’s second co-authored painting, Genesis 2024, takes a similar approach with the first book of the Bible, picturing God – who resembles a surfer dude – in the process of creating all the birds while Adam and Eve frolic by the Tree of Life.

“Paul is very autonomous and he works intuitively – it just flows out of him,” says Johnson. “I’m a bit slower, so he has to wait for me to catch up. He does a bit, then I do a bit, and we go back and forth like that.”

If Rhodes is Johnson’s newest collaborator, then one of his most longstanding is Daniel Bogunovic, a self-taught artist who lives in Los Angeles, USA.

Johnson and Bogunovic have worked on numerous paintings together over the past 20 years, and this exhibition marks their collaborative debut in sculpture, with a series of miniature stupas made from a combination of found materials and custom-machined metal.

“In Buddhism, a stupa is a burial mound or shrine or reliquary for sacred objects,” explains Johnson. “Stupas are highly symbolic in that each level represents a level of the cosmos – earth, water, fire, wind and space.”

Johnson has animated the forms by painting them with the half-closed Eyes of Buddha, taking his cue from two historic stupas at Swayambhunath and Boudhanath in Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, and decorating others with the Om symbol.

“Daniel has constructed these from a variety of found objects such as toy car wheels, wooden building blocks, pingpong balls and bottle tops, but he also designed and fabricated the metal parts at his parents’ metal factory,” says Johnson.

Bogunovic, who shares Johnson’s interest in Buddhist spirituality but is not a practising Buddhist himself, began sending Johnson miniature stupas last year.

“He’d been talking about them for a few years and he gave me one as a present about 15 years ago,” recalls Johnson.

“It’s not always my choice as to what Daniel sends me, so I’m not necessarily in control of how it’s going to turn out. But that’s why I keep collaborating with him, because of his energy and because he’s always offering me new material,” says Johnson.