專家說明
Rashid Johnson’s 2021 painting is a standout example from the artist’s celebrated Bruise Painting series, which shows life at its most fragile and its most beautiful. Arranged in a large grid of approximately eight feet by seven feet, the present work is comprised of an array of thirty frenetic faces, eyes wide open and mouths made up only of swirling lines. Using a particular shade of blue pigment created especially for this project, Johnson lays out a complex series of marks; when viewed up close, these intertwined layers of pigment appear to build up from, and then recede into, the linen support. Another painting from this series entitled Bruise Painting “Message to Our Folks” (2023) currently hangs in the Heritage Hall of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The Bruise Paintings emerged from Johnson’s Anxious Men series (2015-2017), which likewise sought to create a universal language of uncertainty. What changed for Johnson was the COVID-19 pandemic, which he saw as a ‘bruise’ on the entire world. Yet in tragedy, Johnson found healing, as he observes, “It’s the story of recovery…My work has always had concerns around race, struggle, grief and grievance, but also joy and excitement around the tradition and opportunities of Blackness” (R. Johnson, quoted in H. M. Sheets, “In Rashid Johnson’s Mosaics, Broken Lives Pieced Together,” The New York Times, September 23, 2021). In addition to the tragedies of the global pandemic, Johnson also refers to the history of Black music. He debuted his Bruise Paintings at a 2021 exhibition in Los Angeles entitled Black and Blue, which refers to the 1929 Fats Waller jazz standard “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue”. The song was later popularized by Louis Armstrong.
Given the profound subject matter of his work, it is often forgotten that Johnson is also a formalist working within the long history of abstraction. The comparison has rightly been made to the Black abstractionist Alma Thomas, whose colorful compositions stand in fascinating juxtaposition to Bruise Painting “U.S. Blue.” Johnson is also dealing with the history of Abstract Expressionism and the early pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb in particular. As the artist has said, the paintings of Gottlieb helped him realize what he characterized as a kind of epiphany: that through symbols, “a language could be born, and that there was an opportunity to use your artwork as a way to communicate a set of thinking” (A. Sargent, “The Anxiety and Ecstasy of Rashid Johnson,” GQ, October 3, 2023). This is exactly what Bruise Painting “U.S. Blue” accomplishes; it creates a language of anguish that nevertheless becomes a language of hope.
With works like Bruise Painting “U.S. Blue”, Rashid Johnson proves his emotional acuity and his unparalleled ability to distill human experience into his chosen medium. He reminds us that a bruise is nothing to be afraid of or to mourn; rather, it is a corporeal image of the body healing itself, just as Bruise Painting “U.S. Blue” offers a vision of what Johnson calls “a place of nontragedy” (R. Johnson, quoted in H. M. Sheets, “In Rashid Johnson’s Mosaics, Broken Lives Pieced Together,” The New York Times, September 23, 2021).
The Bruise Paintings emerged from Johnson’s Anxious Men series (2015-2017), which likewise sought to create a universal language of uncertainty. What changed for Johnson was the COVID-19 pandemic, which he saw as a ‘bruise’ on the entire world. Yet in tragedy, Johnson found healing, as he observes, “It’s the story of recovery…My work has always had concerns around race, struggle, grief and grievance, but also joy and excitement around the tradition and opportunities of Blackness” (R. Johnson, quoted in H. M. Sheets, “In Rashid Johnson’s Mosaics, Broken Lives Pieced Together,” The New York Times, September 23, 2021). In addition to the tragedies of the global pandemic, Johnson also refers to the history of Black music. He debuted his Bruise Paintings at a 2021 exhibition in Los Angeles entitled Black and Blue, which refers to the 1929 Fats Waller jazz standard “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue”. The song was later popularized by Louis Armstrong.
Given the profound subject matter of his work, it is often forgotten that Johnson is also a formalist working within the long history of abstraction. The comparison has rightly been made to the Black abstractionist Alma Thomas, whose colorful compositions stand in fascinating juxtaposition to Bruise Painting “U.S. Blue.” Johnson is also dealing with the history of Abstract Expressionism and the early pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb in particular. As the artist has said, the paintings of Gottlieb helped him realize what he characterized as a kind of epiphany: that through symbols, “a language could be born, and that there was an opportunity to use your artwork as a way to communicate a set of thinking” (A. Sargent, “The Anxiety and Ecstasy of Rashid Johnson,” GQ, October 3, 2023). This is exactly what Bruise Painting “U.S. Blue” accomplishes; it creates a language of anguish that nevertheless becomes a language of hope.
With works like Bruise Painting “U.S. Blue”, Rashid Johnson proves his emotional acuity and his unparalleled ability to distill human experience into his chosen medium. He reminds us that a bruise is nothing to be afraid of or to mourn; rather, it is a corporeal image of the body healing itself, just as Bruise Painting “U.S. Blue” offers a vision of what Johnson calls “a place of nontragedy” (R. Johnson, quoted in H. M. Sheets, “In Rashid Johnson’s Mosaics, Broken Lives Pieced Together,” The New York Times, September 23, 2021).