Johansson Projects
2300 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, CA 94612
KONO Oakland
Monday | Closed
Tuesday | Closed
Wednesday | Closed
Thursday | 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Friday | 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Saturday | 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Sunday | Closed
Friday, August 7 | 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Artist reception for I Watched Your Leaves Grow Silver in the Wind // Andrew Catanese
"In Your Own Time": Sanctuaries of Resilience, Art as Refuge | June 4 - August 1, 2026
Johansson Projects presents In Your Own Time, a two-person exhibition featuring Turkish painter and sculptor Leyla Pekmen and French painter Julien Laporte. Known for their vivid compositions that illustrate the emotional landscape of their respective regions, both artists consciously embrace the beauty of their surroundings. Steeped in the history of local painting traditions, Pekmen and Laporte reject three-dimensionality, creating narratives through the interplay of color, line, and form.
Leyla Pekmen’s storybook-like compositions are influenced by Ottoman miniature paintings. Originating in the 15th century to narrate the conquests of the ruling class, Pekmen instead opts for scenes of contemporary gathering and recreation. Her jovial paintings examine moments of rest and play that allow space for resilience while living under oppressive systems.
In Pekmen’s work, an idyllic world of larger-than-life flora, gentle waterfalls, and warm oceans ensconces tiny figures. Engaged in activities such as swimming, strolling, and lounging, the figures occupy an infinite, peaceful present. They are lovingly watched over and diligently protected by grand features of the landscape.
Julien Laporte's sun-dappled paintings of the Mediterranean channel the enduring vitality of the coastal landscape and its interaction with the built environment, both as an ecosystem and as a source of artistic inspiration. Drawing on the vibrant and expressive tradition of the Fauves, Laporte's work demonstrates an ecological and historical sensitivity to the region, centering on experiential and energetic engagement with the natural world.
Laporte’s thick brushstrokes and unrestrained color palette command attention, inviting the viewer to feel and see the landscape anew. Reducing form to pattern and shape, expressively rendered trees intermingle with flatly colored architectural features. Void of human figuration, Laporte's immersive landscapes capture moments of stillness along coastal paths, through open windows, along curving stairwells, and at cliff edges.
I Watched Your Leaves Grow Silver in the Wind // Andrew Catanese | August 6 - September 27, 2026
Johansson Projects presents I Watched Your Leaves Grow Silver in the Wind, an exhibition featuring paintings by Andrew Catanese. The exhibition explores ecologies of recollection, as Catanese channels connections among places and individuals, particularly those who linger only in memory.
For Catanese, painting is a narrative medium that moves across time and space, reshaping how we see the everyday world. Their canvases feature landscapes, shifting weather, animals, and spectral figures, each serving as a portal to distinct moments and memories the artist calls “slips” in time and place. Painting becomes a bridge to people and environs that have been lost, abandoned, or rediscovered. Gazes, where they appear, are slant, unfocused. Animals sulk through forests, searching, unaware that they are being watched. Full figures, with backs turned, are ensconced in brambles, alienating them from the viewer. Imbued with distance and uncertainty, Catanese’s lush compositions swim in windswept, haunting ambiguity.
Images:
Andrew Catanese, It Will Not Stop The Leaves From Growing, 2025, Oil on linen