Gallery 01:4

WITTNESS

Behold the two-faced god Janus, cast in bronze by French-American artist Louise Bourgeois. Janus is perhaps the most furtive of deities, as the ancient god of beginnings and endings, transitions, and passages. His two faces look backward and forward at the same time. We are now at the center of the exhibition.

The motif of the “anxious man” has featured in Rashid Johnson’s work for some years. At first, he rendered this personification of anxiety that also embodied a desire for change in black-soap-and-wax-on-tile portraits in 2015. Then, the “anxious man” resurfaced in Rashid’s painting series Anxious Red Paintings, made during the height of the pandemic, to express the profound feelings of loss, isolation, and alienation felt in those years.

Now, after the massive loss of life due to Covid-19, the murder of George Floyd and continuing police brutality against black and brown bodies, and in the midst of more than one war, we look to the “anxious man” as a figure of aftermath and reckoning, revolution and resignation, uncertainty and potentiality. In this new series of Bruise Paintings, Rashid manifests the figure in a range of black and blues, from light blue to almost black, to suggest a wound that might also be a healing. The half-abstract, half-figurative faces, captured in the viscous fields of line and colour, observe and are being observed. In the face of history, we are witnesses and being witnessed.