Near the Lagoon

"Near the Lagoon" is one of Jasper Johns's most ambitious late works, a monumental painting from 2002 executed in encaustic on canvas and wooden boards with attached objects that summarizes the visual vocabulary of his six-decade career. The composition incorporates the crosshatch patterns, map fragments, and bodily impressions that Johns had used repeatedly since the 1970s, but here they are combined with a new element—the wooden boards and objects that project from the canvas surface, making the work a true relief rather than a flat painting. The title refers to Johns's property in Connecticut, where a lagoon surrounded by trees provided the setting for much of his late work; the painting thus functions as a landscape transformed through memory and artistic convention into something simultaneously specific and abstract. The encaustic medium, which Johns had used since the 1950s, is pushed to new physical limits here: the wax is built up in thick layers that trap shadows and create an uneven surface that changes with the viewer's position. This variability is important because it denies the fixed viewpoint that traditional painting demands; "Near the Lagoon" must be walked around, examined from multiple angles, like a sculpture. The attached objects—rulers, string, wooden slats—further complicate the work's identity, blurring the boundary between painting and assemblage in ways that recall Rauschenberg's combines more than Johns's earlier flags and targets. Art historians have debated whether this late work represents a summation or a departure; in either case, it demonstrates that at seventy-two, Johns remained capable of surprises.

This monumental late encaustic relief synthesized six decades of visual vocabulary while pushing wax to sculptural limits, demanding circumambulation and blurring painting-assemblage boundaries.

It matters because at seventy-two Johns made a painting you had to walk around—proving that age could deepen ambition instead of flattening it.