In the rich visual vocabulary of Jasper Johns, symbols speak louder than subjects. His 2020 mixed-media painting Untitled (Lips and Numbers)—a late-career piece imbued with the artist’s hallmark interest in semiotics and abstraction—demonstrates Johns' enduring preoccupation with the layered meanings of signs. The painting, held in a private collection, exemplifies his lifelong interrogation of perception, language, and the boundaries between representation and reality.

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Central to the composition is a pair of bright, almost sensuous red lips—evocative of pop culture iconography, but rendered with painterly abstraction. These lips float amid a heavily worked surface of black and white, scumbled textures, reminiscent of encaustic techniques Johns pioneered in the 1950s. Superimposed on the lips are cryptic symbols: the stenciled numbers “456,” with the number 5 circled; a bold “A” to the left; and a stark “1” to the right. At the bottom, a red circle encloses a coin-like disc—a nod, perhaps, to currency, value, or Duchampian readymades.

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The composition subtly evokes Johns’ early engagement with familiar symbols—flags, numbers, targets—and his treatment of them as both visual and conceptual puzzles. “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it,” Johns once said of his process. This ethos is alive in Untitled (Lips and Numbers), where familiar glyphs are presented without clear context, challenging viewers to ascribe meaning.

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The numerals—fragmented, partly obscured—echo Johns’ historic use of stencils, a technique he often employed to destabilize notions of artistic originality. Here, they are layered over a distressed background suggestive of urban walls or aged maps, recalling Johns’ affinity for palimpsestic surfaces. The map-like lines barely visible beneath the surface may hint at a geographical undercurrent—common in Johns’ recent works that reference his South Carolina upbringing and U.S. topography.

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The circled “5” dominates the upper left, suggesting emphasis or mystery, while the lips, in their red vibrancy, may allude to both desire and silence—a theme not uncommon in Johns’ explorations of coded communication. Critics have long noted the tension in Johns’ work between the legible and the obscure. As art historian Roberta Bernstein noted, “Johns’ signs are both universal and private, endlessly legible yet ultimately withholding".

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This piece, likely completed in the artist’s Sharon, Connecticut studio in his later years, reflects Johns’ deepening embrace of ambiguity, memory, and the evocative power of signs. It is an artifact not just of a legendary American artist, but of a language perpetually under construction—an enduring reminder of how much can be said in what remains unsaid.

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