Olin Johanssen, Penultimate, Orion Custom Framing
Olin Johanssen, close up of Péfto, Penultimate at Orion Custom Framing, 2025
Orion Custom Framing, Bernal Heights, San Francisco Through November 30, 2025
By Kelly Jean Egan
Olin Johanssen’s Penultimate feels like an exercise in joyful accumulation. Hung in the compact, light-filled room at Orion Custom Framing in San Francisco, these canvases capture you with their physical presence before you even read them. The paint sits on the surface like clipped petals or confetti, each dab a small, decisive gesture, with the overall effect being dazzlingly colorful and insistently tactile.
Color is the show’s first language. Johanssen works in unapologetically saturated tones: electric cobalt and deep ultramarine, fuchsia and cadmium red, sunburst yellow and vivid greens. In Baíno, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches, 2024 a dense field of multicolored strokes pushes up against areas of raw white, so that the white acts like a pause or breath between bursts of color.
Other works dispense with restraint entirely, covering the plane in jewel-like pigments that gleam under gallery light. The result is high-contrast, high-energy work that rewards a close, patient look.
Olin Johanssen, Baíno, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches, 2024
The paintings read as much by touch as they do by sight. Thick impasto is applied in small, leaf-shaped strokes that repeat and build rhythmically across the surface. These marks are not accidental; they are deliberate, repeated units that create a kind of visual percussion. Up close, the paint is almost sculptural — glossy, layered, and full of direction — and from a step back those individual marks resolve into shifting swarms of color. The frames are shallow, pale-wood shadow boxes which both contain and celebrate the relief, giving each piece an object-like presence that the works seem to ask for.
Olin Johanssen, Fotiá, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 inches, 2024.
Johanssen’s work resists tidy resolution. Rather than pushing toward a single resolved image, the canvases favor suggestion and momentum: clusters of gesture that imply movement, accumulation, and an openness to what comes next. There’s a celebratory quality here; a sense that making can be abundant and exuberant. It is, however, moderated by structure; the pieces never dissolve into randomness. Instead, pattern and chance coexist, the result of repeated decisions that add up to something larger than any single mark. The exhibition asks for patience; it doesn’t only dazzle with bright color or spectacle. Instead, it holds the viewer in the slower recognition that art is rarely about endings. Each mark leads to the next, each canvas to another. Johanssen seems less interested in offering a final word than in pointing to the restless movement that keeps painting alive.
The pieces resonate with the traditions of abstraction and process art, but they don’t sit neatly inside either category. There are echoes of mid-century expressionist energy and post-minimalist material curiosity, yet Johanssen avoids nostalgia or clever irony. What comes through instead is a conviction that painting still has ground left to cover, if one is willing to look closely at what gets overlooked.
Olin Johanssen, Kairos, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches, 2024.
Seen in Orion — a place dedicated to edges and presentation — the paintings’ tension between containment and overflow becomes especially clear. The framing accentuates the relief and the shadow the marks cast, reminding the viewer that these are objects made as much in space as on plane. The gallery’s modest scale makes the works intimate: they call for proximity, fingers’-length scrutiny, and the kind of slow looking that reveals small color harmonies and compositional counterpoints.
Penultimate doesn’t dramatize painting’s limits so much as investigate its persistent life. These are works that insist painting still has surprises: that the leftover, the residue, the repeated dab and smear can become their own kind of finding. The show asks you to slow down and savor pigment, texture, and the simple pleasure of paint piled up into patterns. It’s less about final statements than about the pleasure, and persistence, of creating.
