Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Vaughn Spann (born in 1992 in Orlando, Florida) is one of those artists who make you want to believe in contemporary art again. In an art world saturated with empty gestures and hollow concepts, he emerges as a tectonic force shaking our firmly held certainties. If you think I’m going to serve you another lukewarm and consensual analysis, you’re dead wrong.
Trained at Yale—yes, that institution you revere so much—Spann could have easily fallen into the trap of sanitized academic art. Instead, he chose to dynamite conventions, creating a body of work that obliterates the boundaries between abstraction and figuration. His paintings now hang on the walls of the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn, and LACMA—not because he plays the system’s game, but because he’s rewritten the rules.
In his Newark studio, far from Chelsea’s spotlights, Spann orchestrates a pictorial revolution that would make your well-meaning art theories quake. Don’t come here seeking the intellectual comfort of prepackaged explanations. As Walter Benjamin wrote, the authenticity of a work resides in “the here and now of the original.” Spann pushes this idea to its furthest limits, creating works that challenge not only photographic reproduction but also our deepest habits of perception.
Let’s talk about his “Marked Men” series, where his genius shines most powerfully. The X dominating these compositions isn’t just a formal device. It stems from a visceral experience: that of a young Black man pressed against a wall by the police, arms and legs spread in an X. This traumatic moment could have been just another biographical anecdote in the grand book of American injustices. But Spann turns it into the starting point of a rare formal exploration.
On canvases often exceeding two meters, these monumental Xs become portals to a dimension where abstraction and political engagement merge. Deep blues collide with incandescent reds, creating fields of force that evoke Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories on the phenomenology of perception. Space is no longer a mere container; it becomes a battlefield where colors and textures clash.
The technique is impeccable, but that’s not what makes these works significant. It’s their ability to transform a symbol of oppression into an act of aesthetic resistance. As Jacques Rancière might have put it, it’s the “distribution of the sensible” made manifest on canvas. Each X is a declaration, an affirmation of presence refusing to be reduced to mere protest.
But Spann doesn’t stop there. His “Rainbow” series may be his boldest contribution to contemporary art history. Using terry cloth towels soaked in paint and woven into the canvas—yes, towels—he creates works of staggering textural complexity. The first painting in this series was a tribute to Trayvon Martin, murdered with a bag of Skittles in his pocket. By deliberately integrating black into the rainbow spectrum, Spann doesn’t just make political art—he literally rewrites our understanding of the chromatic spectrum.
These rainbows aren’t your cheerful corporate inclusivity symbols. They carry a gravity that recalls Theodor Adorno’s reflections on art as a determined negation of the empirical. The very texture of the works—these drenched, twisted, woven, and glued towels—creates an emotional topography defying reproduction. You have to see them in person, feel their physical presence, to understand how Spann manipulates material to create meaning.
The impasto, the layered strokes, the traces of his hands and forearms in the paint are not mere stylistic effects. They create what Deleuze and Guattari would call “surfaces of inscription”, territories where a constant struggle between order and chaos unfolds. Each painting becomes a field of forces where the very materiality of paint is pushed to its limits.
In parallel with these abstract explorations, Spann presents a series of surreal double-headed portraits that meditate on identity and surveillance. These double figures, clad in vibrant colors defying chromatic gravity, aren’t mere stylistic exercises. They embody what Frantz Fanon called the “double consciousness” of Black experience. But Spann goes further: he doesn’t just illustrate these theories; he reinvents them in a pictorial language all his own.
His technical virtuosity is evident in every work but never gratuitous. Spann uses the most mundane materials—terry cloth, house paint, raw canvas—to create works of rare intellectual and emotional sophistication. As Roland Barthes might have said, he creates a new “degree zero” of painting, where the medium itself becomes the message.
Critics who try to reduce him to his influences completely miss the point. Yes, you can see echoes of Stanley Whitney in his use of grids. Yes, there are resonances with Brice Marden in his lyrical compositions. So what? Spann doesn’t copy; he dialogues. Every reference is digested, transformed, reinvented until it becomes unrecognizable. It’s what Susan Sontag called the “will to style”—not a mere visual signature but a unique way of being in the world.
His stubborn refusal to confine himself to a single style isn’t an artist’s whim or a marketing strategy. It’s a philosophical stance, a declaration of independence from the dictates of an art market that demands every artist be immediately recognizable, therefore sellable. Spann reminds us that art is not a product but a process of thought in action.
The speed of his rise in the art world—from Yale to Almine Rech to the Rubell Museum—might suggest instant success, one of those art-world phenomena. Don’t be fooled. Every brushstroke, every aesthetic decision is the result of deep reflection on what it means to be a Black artist in contemporary America. As Stuart Hall wrote, identity is not an essence but a position. Spann occupies his with a confidence that commands respect.
In his most recent abstractions, exhibited at Almine Rech Gallery, blues dominate with an intensity evoking Mallarmé’s “L’Azur”. But where the poet saw blue as an unattainable ideal, Spann makes it a space of concrete possibilities. His paintings aren’t windows to infinity but doors to a future to be built. The way he uses industrial paint alongside more noble pigments isn’t just about economics—it’s a political statement: there’s no hierarchy of materials, only expressive choices.
The way he works the surface of his canvases—often on the floor like Pollock but with very different intent—creates a fascinating tension between control and surrender. The resulting textures are so rich they invite an experience beyond mere looking. It’s what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called “the flesh of the world”: that intersection of the visible and the tangible where our relationship to reality plays out.
His most recent works, exhibited at the Tampa Museum of Art in the “Allegories” exhibition, show a fascinating evolution of his visual vocabulary. The Xs are no longer just symbols of protest; they become portals to other pictorial dimensions. The grid, that traditional structuring element of modern art, is subverted and reinvented. As Rosalind Krauss wrote, the grid is paradoxically both centripetal and centrifugal. Spann plays with this tension masterfully.
The fact that his works are now collected by major institutions is no coincidence. Spann has created a visual language that simultaneously speaks to the intimate and the political, the personal and the universal. His paintings aren’t illustrations of critical theories; they are theoretical propositions themselves, interventions in the debate on what art can be today.
The way he alternates between abstraction and figuration isn’t stylistic indecision but a conscious strategy to explore different ways of speaking truth in painting. As John Berger wrote, “seeing comes before words”. Spann shows us that some truths can only be spoken through abstraction, while others demand figuration.
His use of everyday materials—towels, industrial paint—isn’t just about economy. It’s a statement on the democratization of art, a rejection of traditional hierarchies between noble and ordinary materials. In this, he aligns with a long tradition of artists who, from Kurt Schwitters to David Hammons, have made the ordinary extraordinary.
In his “Dalmatian” series, he pushes even further his reflection on the symbols of the American dream. These black-and-white abstract paintings aren’t mere formal exercises. They emerge from his experience as a child in urban New Jersey neighborhoods, where guard dogs had nothing to do with Hollywood-friendly dalmatians. It’s a sophisticated meditation on the unfulfilled promises of the American dream, translated into a visual language of rare power.
Critics who seek to categorize him as a “political artist” miss the essence. Yes, his work is deeply rooted in contemporary African American experience. But he constantly transcends these categories to create something entirely new. As Edward Said wrote, marginality can be an extraordinary source of creativity. Spann is living proof.
His paintings are not static objects but force fields, spaces where different ways of seeing and thinking clash and reconcile. As Gilles Deleuze wrote, art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible. Spann makes visible not only the tensions of our time but also its possibilities for transformation.
Vaughn Spann has already achieved what many artists spend a lifetime pursuing: the creation of an authentically new visual language. His works are not comments on our time; they are our time, translated into forms and colors. And if you don’t get that, maybe contemporary art isn’t for you.
