Photo: Untitled 2000 by Jasper Johns. Linocut on paper. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Kate Day takes a look at 20 years of Jasper Johns at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

An extensive show of paintings, prints and drawings is on display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh until September 19 2004. It is the first major Jasper Johns show in Britain since 1977.

When we think of a Jasper Johns painting we think of his American flag. By re-painting and re-presenting a familiar image, Johns turned it into a 1950s icon.

The flag continues to feature in this latest collection, peeping around corners, a slice of stars here, a sliver of stripes there. But the flag has had its heyday and, more recently, Johns has begun creating iconography from things a little closer to home.

Photo: Ventriloquist 1983 by Jasper Johns. Encaustic on canvas. Collection Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Through a painting of what is taken to be his studio Johns plays with the idea of what painting is and investigates the way that we look at art. A painting is traditionally considered to be a 2D representation of a 3D object, but Johns throws this fundamental idea on its head by painting drawings and paintings which already exist as flat images.

The flat painted objects are even attached to the wall with initially-believable painted masking tape - as is often the practice in artists' studios.

Johns uses other visual trickery like familiar optical illusions. You may remember arguing over the rabbit/duck image or being deceived by the beautiful young girl who becomes an aged woman when looked at in a different way!

This exploration of the mechanics of seeing is a great source of contemplation for Johns who is quoted in the exhibition catalogue as saying, "In seeing one thing we probably see many".

Photo: Untitled 1999 by Jasper Johns. Intaglio on paper. Collection Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

From a single painting Johns chooses to produce very many more. In one room there are fifteen paintings taking the same essential form and imagery, each approached in a fresh and charming manner. It is fascinating to examine the numerous ways that Johns uses the same subject matter and to see duplicated images reappear throughout 20 years of work.

The assorted elements of a family portrait, harlequin pattern, the Milky Way, the stripes of the American flag, stick-men with paintbrushes and a catenary rope - often used by engineers in the creation of suspension bridges – are each re-presented in these fifteen pieces and feature individually in many others.

Each of these elements seems to have its own original reason for inclusion but, through the repeated exploration of the subject matter, the mechanism of painting more than the meaning is explored.

Photo: Green Angel 1990 by Jasper Johns. Encaustic, sand on canvas. Collection Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Johns has never revealed the original source for a tracing on which one series of paintings is based (entitled Green Angel only because Johns overheard someone describing them in this way), furthermore negating the importance of the subject matter.

Johns seems to love this type of game playing and appears to take pleasure in choosing one painting and repeating and distorting it until the very reason it was begun is lost.

Photo: Face with Watch 1996 by Jasper Johns. Intaglio on paper. Collection Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

With Johns' painted flags a viewer could not be sure whether they were looking at a flag, a painting of a flag, or an abstract painting which just happened to look like a flag.

Similarly in these paintings, by their extensive reproduction of image upon image, any personal element or assured understanding of what is being seen soon becomes questionable. A family portrait is no longer a family portrait; it is a vehicle for exploration, an icon to be distorted.

So don't be taken in by Johns’ apparent use of autobiographical subject matter. As ever, he sees painting as a visual game and the images he chooses, personal or not, are players in it.