Conversations
A conversation between Rashid Johnson and Cristopher Canizares
- 13 January 2019
Cristopher Canizares is the gallery’s Senior Director, Sales America. Cristopher leads the sales team in the United States and also works closely with Rashid Johnson on developing and realizing projects. He and Rashid have enjoyed a professional relationship for over a decade.
Cristopher Canizares: You’ve used ceramic tile in your practice for many years, but over the course of the last year, you have begun to use it in a very specific way. Can you tell me about this?
Rashid Johnson: Absolutely. I did a great residency in the English countryside a couple of years ago, at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, and at one point I decided to take a long weekend in Spain. I have always been interested in Spanish art, and I was excited to visit the Miró museum in Barcelona. Mosaic has a big presence in Barcelona, both in works at the Miró museum and in more anonymous ways throughout the city. It struck me that mosaic is such an effective and almost populist strategy for breaking down and reconstructing images. My work has always been made up of distinct parts, and each part is a specific signifier that I employ with a certain goal in mind. After that trip to Barcelona, the mosaic became a really interesting way to consider how image construction happens, how the placement of broken tile can conjure for the viewer a face or a body. My work in mosaic gave me an opportunity to explore this narrative of conjuring, of a kind of biological topography, building these characters that I’m forcing you to confront.
CC: Another evolution I see concerns your use of color. Since the beginning of your career, your use of color has been sparing and always tied to a specific choice of medium: brown is present because of oak floorboards, yellow comes from shea butter, green appears because of plants, and so on. In these mosaic works, all the colors we see come from the same medium: ceramic tile. It feels like, in these new works, your relationship to color has become more abstract.
Left to right: Rashid Johnson and Cristopher Canizares. Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke
Rashid Johnson, Untitled Broken Crowd, 2019 © Rashid Johnson
RJ: Color is such an interesting thing to engage and negotiate. Thinking about friends who are great painters—like Mary Heilmann, for instance—I have always been so impressed that they can walk into a studio, see lots of tubes of the same medium, and then make color decisions in such an abstract way. My use of color has usually come from my own view of the world, from specific signifiers that have their own natural coloration, like you said, a bit related to the way certain colors are read in art history as powerful cultural signifiers—like how in the Renaissance purple might suggest royalty. Historically, my relationship to color comes out of that mindset: it represents something, means something. More recently, in works like this one, color has become a more abstract opportunity, though I am still not mixing my own colors. The tiles come from a particular factory in Italy in a certain color range, and I make selections from that existing palette. I don’t need to make my own tile colors because I am not invested in inventing new things in the world—I am interested in combining things that exist in the world, giving them new characteristics based on the relationships they gain through combination. This relates to one of the descriptions I recently heard for what creativity is: generating new and interesting relationships by juxtaposing or positioning different objects or materials that are truly strange bedfellows.
CC: In earlier bodies of work, your expressionistic gesture has been a hallmark of the practice, with a viewer able to perceive the speed and athleticism of your mark-making. Producing a work in mosaic tile is almost the opposite, I imagine—a very slow and methodical process.
RJ: Making these works is a slower process, for sure, and a very different one from how I’ve worked in the past. In these mosaics, the image is born in the surface, not applied to it. In most of my work, the underlying materials generally form a substrate that I infuse with my mark-making or dig into—the substrate holds the mark-making and, in a certain way, becomes victim to it. In the mosaics, the substrate is the work itself. On some level, this makes me think of one of my heroes, Lucio Fontana, in that the canvas itself becomes the tool and an active producer of meaning, rather than the recipient of meaning.
‘My work in mosaic gave me an opportunity to explore this narrative of conjuring, of a kind of biological topography, building these characters that I’m forcing you to confront.’
CC: Figuration, even portraiture, has played a big role in your work from the beginning, in a wide variety of ways. Your earliest work was entirely figurative—the Van Dyke photographic portraits—and then for a long time the figure appeared in chosen objects (like on a record album slipcase) but not via your own mark-making. Only in the past four or five years has the figure emerged in what we would call your “painting” practice. Why?
RJ: The Broken Crowd comes out of the Anxious Men paintings I showed at The Drawing Center in 2015 and the Anxious Audience works I showed at Hauser & Wirth in New York the year after. In those works, made of black soap and wax on a ceramic tile ground, the figure is conjured quickly through mark-making and gesture across the surface, given the nature of the molten wax medium and how quickly it cools and hardens. There’s a finite amount of time to bring in and reflect this character’s anxiety. The urgency of the making is part of the anxiety of the work. The Broken Men and Broken Crowds series are far more constructed, by necessity, and it makes me realize that these characters’ fate have now been sealed on some level—this is who they are now—they live now in this permanent state, and it can’t be washed away.
CC: How you do think this notion of permanence contributes to what these works mean in the world?
RJ: When I was making the Anxious Men, there was so much happening geopolitically and socially, and also in my own life, that the paintings were an attempt to navigate and negotiate, and that’s where the anxiety of the character and my gesture came from: many of us felt very anxious about the trends that we saw in the world. Those works were somehow about confronting our naivety, that we didn’t previously see the darkness in the world so clearly, and we were shocked. These Broken Men are not discovering that space—they live there now. They can’t unsee who we are—not what we’ve become but who we actually are—so it makes sense for me to make them feel more permanent. They are broken and we cannot ‘unbreak’ them. That doesn’t mean we can’t grow, experience beauty, see the world through fresh, optimistic eyes. But it does mean that we have to admit that there is no fairytale. The jig is up.
‘Untitled Broken Crowd’ by Rashid Johnson is part of Hauser & Wirth’s presentation at Art Basel, from 13 – 16 June 2019.