PRESENTATION: Rashid Johnson-Black and Blue

Since the beginning of his career, Rashid Johnson has pursued formal innovation in a diverse range of mediums while simultaneously honing a sophisticated and deeply personal vision on a variety of themes such as his autobiography, social history, philosophy, and art history. He addresses the existential conditions of his own life and life itself by making works born of both critical insight and free-form material exploration.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Kordansky Gallery Archive

In “Black and Blue”, a major exhibition, Rashid Johnson presents new bodies of work, including paintings, bronze sculptures, works on paper, and the debut of a new 35mm film. In the exhibition a group of new canvases that Johnson has titled “Bruise Paintings” represent a further development of themes present in his “Anxious Red Paintings.” Made during the pandemic, the “Anxious Red Paintings” embodied the anxiety, isolation, and loss felt by many over the last two years. The “Bruise Paintings” fill the entirety of the North Gallery of David Kordansky and are rendered in deep blue oil paint; the color is spread and layered across the oil-coated linen surfaces so that it takes on a range of blues, from light blue to almost black. The paintings conjure the feelings of aftermath, reckoning, and healing, with half-geometric, half-human faces arranged in expressive, viscous fields of line and color. They also constitute one of several components of the show that draw upon the mood and lyrics of the Fats Waller jazz standard “Black and Blue.” Made popular in a key recording by Louis Armstrong, the song also plays an important role in Ralph Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man”. If the paintings are, on the one hand, indicative of the immediate impacts of violent societal change, on the other, they register a perennial state of affairs, and carry with them a surprising combination of shock, resignation, uncertainty, and poetry. The South Gallery is dedicated to Johnson’s latest engagements in bronze sculpture. “Totems” of head-like forms that resemble the characters in his paintings, these works also function as planters and include living plants that assert their own organic, ever-changing formalism. Their surfaces are covered with frenetic, palpably emotional mark-making that brings them into further relation with two-dimensional disciplines like drawing and painting. Like many of the different types of work that constitute his practice, they include diverse materials and objects—among them, records and oyster shells—that Johnson brings together to conjure their forms into being. The contrast between the existential and the mundane is a driving force in the new film on view, also titled “Black and Blue”. Shot on 35mm the film depicts the movements of the protagonist—played by Johnson himself—as he navigates his daily routine. Eating, driving, exercising, spending time with family, and sleeping make up a life, and yet they are precisely the activities that get overlooked when epochal shifts are analyzed and commemorated. The film is suffused with claustrophobia and isolation, though what is being witnessed has a complete lack of conflict or tragedy. A persistent melancholia inhabits each of the film’s segments; Johnson returns the gaze to the intimate endeavors of being human, which people do their best to sustain regardless of what is happening in the world at large. Woven throughout the film are sounds and images that reveal their close connection to Johnson’s other works, both the new work in the current exhibition and from throughout his career. Photography books, novels, African sculptures, oyster shells, and branded wood—which have all appeared in the artist’s oeuvre—are incorporated into the film, either in the character’s environment or in brief flashes that move with the intuitive fluidity of thoughts and dreams. But so do atmospheric passages that are—like many of the guiding spirits in his project—abstract, open-ended, and evocative of natural worlds as much as cultural ones. Installed alongside the film in the West Gallery are a group of works on paper in which Johnson further explores the “Anxious” iconography present in the “Bruise Paintings”. Working on oil rag paper, he demonstrates how his vocabulary pivots between the abstract, the representational, and the conceptual, challenging the notion that these can be understood as separate categories. The grids of faces embody, on the one hand, the freneticism of intense psychological response; on the other, though, they reveal roots in non-objective minimalism. As such, they are vehicles for both internally and externally oriented modes of awareness.

Photo: Rashid Johnson, Untitled from the Bruise Paintings series, 2021, oil on cotton rag, © Rashid Johnson, Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

Info: David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 18/9-30/10/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidkordanskygallery.com