Jasper Johns (American, born 1930), Near the Lagoon, 2002. Encaustic on canvas and wooden boards with objects, 300 × 198.1–214.6 (variable) × 10 cm. Stenciled on bottom recto (paint in several colors): N J E A A S R P T E H R E J L O A H G N O S O 0 N 2 Straight-edge grid lines and freehand lines on verso (blue crayon and black crayon). Art Institute of Chicago, Through prior gift of Muriel Kallis Newman in memory of Albert Hardy Newman (2004.146). Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Jasper Johns has often affixed objects to the surfaces of his paintings in an ongoing search for non-illusionistic ways of mediating between the flat plane of the picture and a fully dimensional world. For his Catenary series (1997–2003), of which Near the Lagoon is the largest and last work, Johns formed catenaries—a term used to describe the curve assumed by a cord suspended freely from two points—by tacking ordinary household string to the canvas or its supports. In Near the Lagoon, the string activates and engages the abstract, collaged field of multitonal gray behind it, casting an actual shadow on the canvas, in addition to the painted ones that Johns rendered by hand; the string even creates a rut where the artist embedded it into and later pulled it out of the encaustic.