joseph scissorhands: Rashid Johnson: Waves

"I had gotten sober in 2014 and I started making [the Broken Men series] in 2015 as a response to living in a world that I didn't know how to live in without drugs and alcohol. That was paralleled by the killing of Mike Brown, Donald Trump running for president and the global refugee crisis [...] I felt like my eyes had just opened [...] A lot of my work is dealing with historical narratives and the autobiographic: What's my story? How does it fit into these historical narratives? I was making a project that was quite timeless in a sense. But the work, upon me becoming sober, started to look at the world that we were living in at the time. It was really kind of a shock. There was no more buffer. I had no escape tool, I didn't have the fluid that I had used to perform my escape. And so the work started showing a different urgency by speaking to time in a way that it hadn't so much prior. " - Rashid Johnson

Rashid Johnson came to prominence in the art world with his Anxious Men series of paintings. What better show to go visit then (in the period between the original lockdown and the current lockdown 2.0), in a year full of high anxiety, than Johnson's latest show Waves at Hauser & Wirth. Waves features Johnson's new Broken Crowd series of works in the first of the gallery spaces, which examine states of toxic masculinity in certain contemporary males. These works are huge paintings of block-headed figures. The size and colour of these paintings certainly make an impact within the gallery space. They are busy, collaged compositions, consisting of overpainted ceramic tiles, cracked mirrors and shaped, branded, wooden inserts. As a result the reflective surfaces of these works seems to shimmer and dazzle. Perhaps these fractured surfaces are meant to be a reflection of, or glimpses of the psyche, and the stress and anxiety that these figures are feeling. Johnson's iconography and elements of his technique reminded me of that of Jean-Michel Basquiat (previously on this blog here), but these figures seemed to be more constrained, being confined within uniform, grid-like constructions on the surface of the paintings.

"Johnson updates the visual language of his long-established Anxious Men in new works as part of his Anxious Red Paintings series, which began as drawings made during and in reaction to the global lockdown, leading Johnson to produce expansive oil paintings. Using oil on linen and a blood red medium for the first time to depict the deceptively crude archetypal faces, Johnson has captured the ‘life and death’ urgency that has separated and connected communities around the globe. This red pigment, entitled Anxious Red, was created specially by Johnson for these paintings. The opacity and slippery texture of the medium itself brings a mobility to the works: a nod to the importance of movement and gesture within Johnson’s oeuvre. Just as Johnson selects his typical materials and tools – such as shea butter and black soap – for the importance of their historical narratives, here he has chosen to use the canonically significant, and universally recognisable, medium of oil paint in order to communicate his message all the more urgently. As Johnson himself says, ‘this body of works does not hide from its ambition to be understood’. As such, his Anxious Red Paintings can be read as history paintings for our times." - Hauser & Wirth.

I then moved into the second of the Hauser & Wirth spaces which housed this collection of Johnson's Anxious Red paintings. These were all painted during the self-distancing of the first lockdown earlier this year. There was very little difference in the rows of grids and anxious faces of the paintings here which seemed to dull the impact of the sense of anger and anxiety felt by the figures during the initial lockdown due to the COVID virus. What did resonate though were the grids in the paintings that confined the faces. This echoed the experience we all had of being confined to our homes and the sense of cabin-fever which had us all on edge in our imposed isolation. Although these paintings appeared to be loosely painted, and vigorous in style, there was a sense of calm in this gallery space because of the limited, unifying red colour palette. The colour of these paintings - "Anxious Red" is a specially formulated colour made to Johnson's specifications in the similar way Yves Klein had the bespoke colour Yves Klein Blue created for his artworks. This exhibition will hopefully resume its run at the beginning of December.