Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I know that some of you still prefer still lifes with smooth apples and portraits of lace-clad grandmothers, but it’s time to wake up: Rashid Johnson (born in 1977) is one of the most impactful artists of our time. Forget your prejudices about contemporary art, your little certainties neatly arranged like the paths of your French garden. Johnson dynamites all of that with a mastery that would make your academic heroes pale.
Let’s start with his way of addressing collective anxiety, this ailment of our time. His “Anxious Men” and “Anxious Audiences” are not just random scribbles that your five-year-old nephew could draw. These faces, carved from a blend of black wax and African soap, are silent screams that resonate in our troubled consciences. These tortured figures, lined up like prisoners of a system that overwhelms them, are the direct heirs of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s “Character Heads”, with the fundamental difference that Johnson doesn’t aim to catalog individual emotions but to capture the very essence of our societal unease. It’s Frantz Fanon meeting Francis Bacon in a broken elevator.
These anxious faces, Johnson transforms into veritable totems of our time. There’s something here that recalls the Dan masks of Côte d’Ivoire, but reimagined through the prism of our fractured modernity. When Picasso appropriated African masks, it was still with a colonial gaze. Johnson, however, reinvents this formal language with an acute awareness of contemporary identity issues. His grids of faces evoke the surveillance screens of our paranoid metropolises, turning every viewer into an involuntary voyeur of this collective anxiety.
And what about his masterful way of subverting materials? Black soap, shea butter, shattered mirrors are not mere mediums; they carry within them a historical and symbolic weight that shatters our certainties about what “noble” art should be. Johnson transforms these everyday materials into vehicles for a profound reflection on identity, memory, and power. When he uses shea butter, it’s not to be pretty or exotic; it’s to confront us with our biases about what constitutes legitimate artistic material. It’s Marcel Duchamp meeting James Baldwin in an African cosmetics shop.
But where Johnson truly excels is in his ability to create spaces that are simultaneously sanctuaries and zones of confrontation. Take his installation “Antoine’s Organ”: this monumental structure, blending live plants, books, video monitors, and shattered screens, is a postmodern cathedral where nature reclaims its rights over our sanitized civilization. It’s an urban jungle that echoes the colonial greenhouses of the 19th century but completely reverses the balance of power. The plants are no longer exotic specimens to be cataloged but living presences colonizing the white gallery space.
Johnson’s brilliance lies in his deft play with expectations around “Black art.” He rejects clichés while using them as raw material to create something radically new. His “Escape Collages” are not mere decorative collages; they are mental maps of an identity in perpetual construction. When he integrates palm trees or tropical motifs, it’s not to appear “authentic” or “exotic” but to underscore the absurdity of such expectations.
In his recent works, particularly the “Soul Paintings” and “God Paintings”, Johnson pushes his exploration of contemporary spirituality even further. The vesica piscis, this almond-shaped form running through his recent work, is not just a decorative motif. It is a portal to a dimension where the sacred and the profane merge. These paintings are not windows into the soul; they are mirrors reflecting our own spiritual quest in a world that has lost its traditional bearings.
What’s most fascinating about Johnson is that he creates works that function simultaneously as powerful aesthetic objects and as incisive social commentary. His “Broken Men”, these fragmented figures made of tesserae and shattered mirrors, are portraits of our fractured humanity. These are not victims he shows us but survivors who wear their scars like medals. It’s Louise Bourgeois meeting Ralph Ellison in a mirror shop.
His work with mosaics and ceramic tiles is particularly intriguing. These materials, traditionally associated with domestic decoration, become in his hands surfaces where an existential drama unfolds. The cracks, the breaks, the imperfections are not accidents but essential elements of the visual vocabulary. It’s as if Johnson is telling us that beauty lies precisely in these ruptures, these discontinuities that make us human.
The performative dimension of his work must not be overlooked. Even in his seemingly static works, there’s always a sense of movement, of ongoing transformation. His installations are theaters where the drama of our contemporaneity plays out. The overturned chairs, the growing plants, the mirrors that reflect and fragment the space: everything contributes to a complex choreography where the viewer becomes an actor despite themselves.
The film “Native Son”, which he directed in 2019, is not a mere adaptation of Richard Wright’s novel: it’s a radical reinterpretation that questions the contemporary relevance of racial archetypes. By transposing the story to our time, Johnson doesn’t simply modernize the narrative; he reveals its profound resonances with our own social anxieties.
What makes Johnson’s work so important today is his ability to transcend easy categories. He is not a “Black artist” creating “Black art” for a “Black audience.” He is an artist who uses his personal experience as a starting point to explore universal questions. His work speaks to us about anxiety, identity, spirituality, and power in a way that resonates with our troubled era.
In an art world obsessed with easy labels and marketing categories, Johnson remains elusive, refusing to be boxed into a comfortable niche. His work is a constant challenge to our assumptions about what contemporary art can or should be. This is precisely what makes him one of the most essential artists of our time.
And if you’re still not convinced, if you still prefer your little Sunday watercolors, so be it. While you marvel at limited-edition sunsets, Johnson continues to create art that forces us to confront the contradictions and anxieties of our time. Art that doesn’t merely decorate our walls but shakes them to their foundations.
