Global scale

The American artist Rashid Johnson (born in 1977) is one of the global stars of current art. This handsome man with his colossal stature and sparkling smile exhibits a rare characteristic. Although his work is extremely present on a global scale, it takes extremely different forms from one moment to the next.

Whitney museum

He began his career in photography, but among his recent achievements we find, for example, a permanent installation on the ground floor of the Whitney Museum in New York. It features a monumental metal shelf containing ceramic pots and screens, which has the particularity of being positioned both inside and outside Renzo Piano’s glass building: “The idea of ​​public and private space and how we access it is an interesting conundrum. A lot of my work is about that.” This explanation alone sums up his spirit well. Each of his gestures, each object used, each line repeated on a canvas responds to a personal philosophy, which he explains using precise phrasing.

Leon Golub

Leon Golub

In September 2024 he was the curator at Hauser & Wirth in New York of an exhibition dedicated to the figurative painter born, like him, in Chicago, and now long forgotten, Leon Golub (1922-2004). In October 2024 he opened a three-part exhibition in Paris called “Anima”, consisting of new paintings plus a video.

Leon Golub

Sanguine

For me, his video titled “Sanguine” is undoubtedly the most striking and original piece of the exhibition. It features three generations of boys from the Johnson family (with him at the center). Here he masters the art of juxtaposing images and ideas  using, but not only, stereotypes tied to African American culture with personal memories of his vision by the seaside, where he caught a glimpse of what God might be. I will talk about it later…

Guggenheim in New York

In Hauser & Wirth gallery in Paris, in the first room, the canvases are composed, among other things, of intertwined shapes like stringy mesh forms, which could resemble hollowed-out armour or skeletons. These are repeated obsessively. In November 2024 Johnson also unveiled a monumental mosaic made up of colourful abstract shapes at Doha airport. But most significantly, the Guggenheim Museum in New York has just announced that in April 2025 Johnson’s work will occupy the entire rotunda of the famous spiral building. The crowning achievement of a career that is still progressing, but above all the ideal opportunity to understand the articulations of his work.

We began our interview with the subject of one of his remarkable predecessors, accomplice of the Dadaists and Surrealists, Francis Picabia (1879-1953). Rashid Johnson likes to delve into art history.

Picabia and Johnson

He says that in 2018, during Picabia’s retrospective at Moma in New York, the illustrious museum which owns two of his works – compared to 12 in the case of the Whitney Museum – had him come to talk about the iconoclastic modern artist. Contrary to what you might expect, there are at least two things in common between Picabia and Johnson.  Picabia was a dandy who was crazy about beautiful cars. “He loved refined things. I respect that,” Johnson points out.

Captain Kirk form Star Trek

But their real common value is a deliberate instability in their creation. “Picabia’s ambition was to not be easily defined in his projects. Obviously you have his relationship to abstraction (1), his relationship to figuration and representation. Some of the work is quite sexualized. Some of the work is actually very much outside of any sort of sexual reading. Some of it is rigorous. I talked about him like he was Captain Kirk from Star Trek Enterprise. That he zoomed into different spaces and explored spaces that had not been explored in the way that he explored them.

Vulnerability

Style isn’t consistent. I think if I were to choose language to define my interest in medium, it would be vulnerability.” Johnson continues: “Kurosawa, the filmmaker, once said, which I thought was brilliant, that the only responsibility that an artist has is to never avert their eyes.” This is how Rashid Johnson comes to explain the essence of what he does, as always, with a conceptual guiding principle: “And if that is what the responsibility of the artist is, when you’re keeping focused and you’re continuing to look at the world that we live in, both exterior and your own interior light, you’re going to have a kaleidoscopic sense of emotions and ideas that are born from that.

From funny to serious

Meaning that sometimes if you’re continuing to look, it’s going to be very funny. Sometimes when you continue to look, it’s going to be very sad. Sometimes when you continue to look, it’s going to be very serious. And so if you never avert your eyes and your project continues over an extended period of time, you’ll have a little bit of everything in it.”

Naturally the discussion arrives at an illustration of his theories through the exhibition currently being held in Paris.

“In this exhibition, I think you see a lot of self-reflection. I think that you see a lot of investigation. Starting from the title: the soul.”

Unsolvable problem

“How do you begin a painting about the soul? “It’s a paradox. How do you begin to represent something unrepresentable. It’s something an artist must grasp. Because it’s an unsolvable problem”. Pointing out to him that the forms taken by his Souls can evoke both skeletons and knights, he responds: “I love any interpretation of an artwork I’m less invested in my intention and very much interested in interpretation.”

Incantation

Johnson seems to practice painting as an incantatory exercise. So when we talk about his repetitive motifs, he explains: “repetition is part of the process of meditation.” And his meditation is painting… We approach the subject of the other series of his paintings presented at Hauser & Wirth. On a blood-red background, they are punctuated repetitively with oval shapes, which could be slits, eyes or “Origines du monde”: “I call them God paintings. “Yes, it’s a grand title.”

Getting sober

Here Rashid begins to tell a very personal story: “I was ten years ago getting sober. And through that process I was told by a number of people that I needed to find a higher power. And that as a shorthand we could call that higher power God. I was sitting on the beach one day with my son who at the time was about two years old.

I closed my eyes

And I closed my eyes and I felt the warmth on my face from the sun. And I looked through my eyelids and I saw the red light that kind of peered through my eyelids. From the sun, kind of beating down on my face. And that red became something that I often refer to as God. And so in that sense, for me, the idea of God is represented through this red. It’s also a reference to a certain optimism against the backdrop of complicated circumstances.”

Rashid Johnson is both vulnerable and secretive, changeable and repetitive. A man rich in contradictions who seems to follow the precept of Picabia, who liked to say: “Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.”

Until 21 December.

https://www.hauserwirth.com/fr/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/rashid-johnson/