Lot145 N11732 Rashid Johnson Anxious Red Painting August 20th
“The healing process starts with the negotiation of blunt force trauma… It’s the story of recovery.”
The surface of Anxious Red Painting August 20th resonates with ferocious immediacy, its incendiary field of scarlet forming both barrier and wound: scratched, smeared, and scoured lines coalesce into an expanse of anxious figuration. Within its monochromatic vigor, crimson becomes both matter and metaphor, burning with the simultaneity of fear and vitality, rage and resilience. Composed in a grid of feverishly rendered faces, the painting confronts the viewer with the collects ive roar of psychic unrest. Part of Rashid Johnson’s celebrated Anxious Red series, the present work extends his career-long investigation into collects ive anxiety and the personal trauma of the African American experience. Using red as a declaration of urgency, he evokes emotion through color, line and form: Johnson translates the tension between inner life and public crisis into gesture. Created during the initial months of 2020, the series evolved from his earlier Anxious Men works — transforming the black soap and wax of those mosaics into fields of searing pigment. The artist has described this shift as an “honest interpretation of where I felt like we were. There was a real urgency.” (The artist quoted in: Mark Rappolt, “Rashid Johnson on Anxiety, Agency and Digital Exhibitions,” ArtReview, 4 December 2020 (online))
“I say that I suffer from what Rosalind Krauss was calling the post.mes dium condition, where an artist essentially employs several mediums in order to bring to life whatever specific ideas that they have. For me it's always been that way."
In Anxious Red Painting August 20th, Johnson distills the spirit of Anxious Men into a singular chromatic plane. The heads, once delineated against white tile grids, now dissolve into loops and slashes, subsumed by the fervor of mark-making. Johnson’s hand moves restlessly, his line trembling with psychic charge; each incision recalls both scar and script, a visceral record of endurance. “It’s the story of recovery,” he once reflected, “the healing process starts with the negotiation of blunt force trauma.” (The artist quoted in: Hilarie M. Sheets, “In Rashid Johnson’s Mosaics, Broken Lives Pieced Together,” The New York t.mes s, 26 September 2021 (online))
For Johnson, red is both warning and witness — an assertion of presence that refuses despair. The painting internalizes collects ive emotion within the intimacy of gesture; each scrawl and incision is a confrontation with immediacy, an attempt to register breath in a moment of suffocation. Anxiety here is not a transient mood but a sustained condition of existence. “How to tolerate and how to interpret and how to locate ourselves in this t.mes ,” Johnson asks, “how to, in a sense, be both historians and illustrators.” (Mark Rappolt, “Rashid Johnson on Anxiety, Agency and Digital Exhibitions,” ArtReview, 4 December 2020 (online))
As in the tactile intensity of Jean Dubuffet’s art brut and the scrawled exuberance of Cy Twombly, Johnson’s hand oscillates between scripture and gestural mark making. Yet his language is wholly his own—a palimpsest of African diasporic memory and contemporary unease. Within this framework, Anxious Red Painting August 20th reads as both painting and performance—a ritualized act of making that fuses emotion, intellect, and physicality. The surface, smeared and scratched, evokes the immediacy of human touch, recalling the artist’s engagement with material as metaphor. “I suffer from what Rosalind Krauss was calling the post.mes dium condition,” he notes, “where an artist employs several mediums to bring to life whatever specific ideas they have. For me, it’s always been that way.” (The artist quoted in: Kimberly Chou, “The Conditions of Being Medium,” Art in America, 6 April 2010 (online))
Each mark in Anxious Red Painting August 20th operates as both fissure and filament, fracture and thread; it acknowledges the pain of fragmentation while envisioning the beauty of recomposition. As the eye roams across the all-over field, it finds no sanctuary, only movement, the same restless agitation that defined the era of its making. The result is an image both monumental and intimate. The painting’s vast field confronts the viewer with unflinching directness, yet its every gesture feels deeply personal, drawn from the fraught intersection of selfhood and society. Its anxiety is communal, a chorus of voices compressed into pigment.
