VSF proudly announces Total Presence, John Miller’s (b. 1954, Cleveland, OH) first solo at our Los Angeles space. Total Presence centers on a new series of trompe l’oeil paintings with squares of Miller’s signature burnt sienna impasto floating over banal yet intriguing photographic montages of urban surfaces and landscapes. Alongside these recent works are Miller’s 2020 video, The Trip, and an immersive installation, An Illusion of an Illusion (2024). This selection, by looping the viewer through a sequence of effects raging from haptic shock to hypnotically banal, captures conflicting feelings that arise from the overwhelming compulsion to consume products, media, and images up to and beyond the point of pleasure.
Grounded in photo montages of the urban landscape shot in New York, Berlin, and Seoul, Miller’s trompe l’oeil paintings have a simple premise: superimposing brown shapes over photos of public space. Miller started these works in 1999 as a series of lightboxes that reimagined his older brown paintings and sculptures as public works. In this, Claes Oldenburg’s Proposed Monuments and Robert Smithson’s drawings inspired him. Three years later, the near uniform critical rejection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition” drew Miller’s attention, prompting him to start making trompe l’oeil works. Yet, in these, Miller also draws from Cubist montage.
Miller composes his trompe l’oeil paintings from photographs of various surfaces shot straight on. He adds squares with drop shadows that suggest volume and texture to these. Finally, he paints the area within the squares. He notes, “I was going for a haptic emphasis on surface and a collision of heterogeneous surfaces reflecting the sensory shock of urban environments.” Miller took the titles for most of these paintings from critics’ and art historians’ descriptions of tromple l’oeil effects. The titles are somewhat redundant -- but somehow poetic.
