Revolution Blues, an exhibition by artist Michael St. John features new paintings and sculptures in the gallery’s front room and a series of small paintings titled Negroes with Guns in the project room.

Like Baudelaire’s ideal artist a flaneur who walks on the streets of the city Michael St. John creates his work through a direct observation of reality and a re-appropriation of the discarded as a way to find form and content through an unmediated response to the present. St. John is attracted to the beauty present in the detritus of everyday life, to the meaning to be found in the recognition of unassuming objects on the streets. This exploration triggers an original brand of realism, in which forms are not created in an arbitrary way, but new forms are found in what he calls public forms. Their transformation through re-contextualization gives them new content and meaning. Giving aesthetic dignity to things found in low places, raising them to a formal appreciation redeems, commemorates and transforms our experience. There is a unique mixture of low and high elements in St. John’s art: pop references, informal, the abject, street detritus, all filtered through a sophisticated formal, political and cultural sensibility. His attention to reality and experience unavoidably saturates the work with pervasive anxiety as well as issues of race, class, and injustice.

Thus, the signboard paintings come from the direct observation of an empty signboard from which all the information was removed. The formal recreation of this simple object becomes a vigil, as well as a memorialization of people’s voices, a meditation on mortality. In a similar way, St. John recreates a street lamppost with its layers of torn flyers, stickers and writings. This archaic form of communication, formalized and used in a different context, isolates these voices and emphasizes their existential quality. In the raft paintings, a bundle of wood and cardboard observed the street becomes the starting point for paintings memorializing the death of the public intellectual (figures like R. M. Fassbinder and A. Warhol).

In the project room, St. John will exhibit 14 small paintings inspired by the book Negroes with Guns by Robert F. Williams published in 1962. A complex and fascinating figure, Robert F. Williams wrote Negroes with Gun’s to justify the right of black people to defend themselves from racist violence and police brutality with all the necessary means. The book was subsequently adopted by the Black Panther Party as one of their guiding texts. St. John composes each of these paintings as if it were the cover of a book, repeating the letters of the title and adding the image of a civil right activist or Black Panther in each painting. Many of them died after gunshot, often by the police.