Rashid Johnson’s The Wave belongs to a series of paintings that centre around themes of escapism and anxiety; subjects of poignant relevance in today’s quasi tumultuous pandemic climate. Indeed, there is an air of apprehension discernible in Johnson’s scratchy, agitated aesthetic; a style that is simultaneously provocative of Jean Dubuffet and Jean-Michel Basquiat, in which maniacal mark making is at the heart of the picture plane. In the present work, large expanses of silky black pigment are adorned with scores of Abstract Expressionist slashes, in turn demonstrating an affinity to the post-war Art Brut movement; primitive and child-like in execution, yet extremely profound in its insight into the human psyche. Split into six panels, Johnson offers the viewer half a dozen anthropomorphic forms, regimented and called to attention. The dizzying and chaotic nests located in their ‘heads’ and ‘torsos’, suggest a palpable and visceral crisis of sorts.
As widely recognised jazz enthusiast, Johnson recalls how he absorbed the syncopated rhythms of Pollock’s drip paintings, recognising its improvisational technique:
‘It felt like abstraction shared a history with jazz and improvisation and it felt like we all owned it.’
In reflecting on his fruitless searches for other Black faces in the museum quality paintings that he visited during his youth, Johnson clarifies, ‘I gravitated towards the work that allowed me to see my own relationship to it and a lot of times that was through abstraction.’ (Ibid).
Johnson further comments: ‘There's a generation of black artists before me who made work specifically about the black experience. But I think for my generation, having grown up in the age of hip-hop and Black Entertainment Television, there's less of a need to define the black experience so aggressively to a white audience. I think it gives us a different type of opportunity to have a more complex conversation around race and identity. It’s not a weapon for me, it’s more of an interest.’ (Katy Cowan, ‘Rashid Johnson mixes painting and ceramic tile mosaics to express the anxiety and escapism of ‘Broken Men’, Creative Boom, 18 September 2020, online)
Born in Chicago in 1977, Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whose work employs a wide range of media to explore themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, personal narratives, literature, and critical history. After studying in the photography department of the Art Institute of Chicago, Johnson’s practice quickly expanded to embrace a wide range of media – including sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and installation – yielding a complex multidisciplinary practice that incorporates diverse materials rich with symbolism and personal history. Johnson achieved critical acclaim following the pivotal Black Art exhibition curated by the celebrated Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001. Since then, Johnson has moved to New York, where he resides, and his work has been exhibited around the world. In the Autumn of 2021, Johnson will have a major show opening at Hauser & Wirth’s London galleries (6 October–23 December).