Devin B. Johnson’s work emerge on the canvas like ghostly, dreamlike apparitions—visible remnants that stand up to the gradual erosion of reminiscence. His scenes exist in suspended rigidity between figuration and abstraction, between the sensory depth of trauma and the blurred contours of a dream upon waking, when the self begins drifting away from the oneiric realm the place the unconscious speaks. In his arms, paint turns into a way of reattuning and reconstructing that area; the white canvas, a stage on which to confront it.
“My curiosity is in reminiscence and the unconscious; that’s why the work really feel articulated in fragments,” Johnson tells Observer as we stroll by way of his new exhibition “Crossing,” on view at Nicodim Gallery by way of November 8. For Johnson, portray is a means to consider nostalgic area. That’s the place his muted tonal vary comes from: the grays, the desaturated chromatic colours, the atmospheric haze. Mixing realism with surreal gesture, his work turns into a poetic act of recollection and reconnection or an try and retrieve what lingers beneath the floor of consciousness and the previous. Along with his work, he navigates histories of illustration, city motion and diasporic trauma, shifting fluidly between the private and the collective, the remembered and the forgotten. “They evoke that phenomenon of recollection—how remembering truly works,” he says. “Whenever you keep in mind one thing, particularly one thing emotionally loaded, it’s all the time fragmented. It’s by no means an ideal replay of the way it occurred.”
Johnson instinctively manipulates each topic and floor, permitting shifts in texture and colour to translate psychological and sensory transitions. But his scenes are deliberately by no means totally resolved, both pictorially or narratively. They continue to be open, as if capturing reminiscence and historical past nonetheless in movement, nonetheless forming. Fragmentation turns into a method: opening an occasion or picture to a number of readings and avoiding the authority of a single interpretation. “Leaning into that fragmentation is how I like to consider actuality itself: the way it falls aside or reforms on this hazy, virtually musical means. Reminiscence isn’t linear; it dissolves and recomposes,” he explains.
What Johnson evokes in lots of the works on view can be one thing profoundly particular: the day by day psychological, cognitive and emotional actuality of residing in a metropolis like New York: a steady crossing of narratives, languages, cultures and views that defines the city situation. The town, all the time in flux, holds the potential for fixed reinterpretation but additionally the danger of overexposure, the place expertise multiplies quicker than we are able to course of or mirror and that means slips by way of the cracks of noise and pace.
“All of us who’ve walked the streets or subway stations can recall how sure partitions or corners slowly change over time. That speaks to a type of kinetic, haptic reminiscence embedded in any metropolitan area,” Johnson displays. “There are all the time folks shifting by way of it, navigating it. That motion creates a relentless layering of reminiscence.”
On this sense—aligned with Situationist pondering, which requires a inventive and significant interpretation of city area that reclaims company—town turns into a palimpsest of visions and sensations. It’s a residing floor upon which we construct our day by day actuality and our thought of self inside and between the interrelational material of existence {that a} metropolis intensifies.
“My work actually comes from strolling the streets—an observational means of trying,” Johnson continues. “I’m continuously shifting by way of town with my head turning, watching how the city atmosphere comes collectively.” For him, magnificence might be discovered wherever: in a storage, an alley, a wall. “In case you’re open to it, you’ll be able to glean magnificence from essentially the most atypical locations.” His work communicate to this follow of statement, contemplation and attunement and of finding magnificence inside the chaos of city life.
On the identical time, these works usually describe and inhabit a state of transition: a dialog simply starting and left suspended, a motion on the street not but resolved, a doable encounter merely recommended. The viewer is invited to think about its unfolding. “The liminality of going from one level to a different—that in-between state—is central to my work,” Johnson says. The exhibition title, “Crossing,” speaks on to that threshold: the second when there may be an A, however the B has not but revealed itself. “It’s the area of transition, of changing into, and portray turns into a option to simulate that threshold.”
Right here, we are able to additionally learn Johnson’s effort to push towards the static nature of portray, suggesting as a substitute a bodily and psychological actuality of being that’s all the time in flux. “That’s usually my entry level: creating figures strolling by way of emotional and psychological area,” he explains. From this interrelational, ever-moving situation arises the universality of his scenes. “These may very well be New York Metropolis, Paris, Africa or wherever,” he observes. “There’s a type of common ‘someplace’ all of us acknowledge, even when it’s not tied to a particular location.” It’s a place the place humanity manifests in an epiphanic second of revelation.
Within the two largest work within the present, Crossing (2025) and All Keep Behind (2025), this inner rigidity turns into totally seen: a friction between the exact rendering of figures and the intuitive eruption of sensation, which disrupts any linear narrative and opens the picture to the sorts of contradictions that form our notion of actuality: the hole between what we expertise, what we’re instructed and what we are able to articulate inside the limits of language and motive.
Johnson explains that these two work have been the primary he made for the exhibition they usually set the heartbeat of all the present. He normally begins by working by way of concepts slowly, usually with out totally understanding what he’s attempting to do, however every portray helps him tease out the course, the power and the questions that the physique of labor will confront. “You possibly can see what I’m talking about—this navigation by way of area, this kinetic power. It’s not solely within the dripping of the paint, but additionally in the way in which power clusters throughout the canvas,” Johnson notes. The portray he refers to, Crossing, is without doubt one of the largest he has ever made and the central work from which the exhibition takes its title.
This monumental canvas depicts an unlimited city road in flux, traversed by a number of lives, their tales presumably intersecting or weaving collectively for an immediate or lacking one another fully. A number of Black males stroll previous a white automobile, or maybe it’s one topic duplicated, suggesting movement and psychological multiplicity. White doves hover and drip overhead, producing a layered picture that evokes motion, reminiscence and simultaneity inside the metropolis. “This portray can be about configuration and rigidity—pushing paint, pushing materials and on the identical time permitting the fabric to behave freely,” he says. “Letting the paint drip makes the work really feel prefer it hasn’t totally arrived but. It’s nonetheless changing into. That unfinished high quality feels truthful to me, like reminiscence, like motion, like life within the metropolis itself.”
But Johnson is equally fascinated about inserting anchors—symbolic presences that join fleeting city moments to a bigger human historical past the place psychological and historic patterns recur. Unsurprisingly, he has lately been drawn to the pondering of Carl Jung. “What’s been fascinating for me currently is utilizing symbols as anchors,” he notes. “Jung talks about iconoclastic symbols or totems—types that may level to non-public, particular person that means. I began incorporating symbols that maintain significance to me personally, however can even open the portray to different interpretations.” Within the central portray, automobiles and pigeons function archetypal symbols. “Pigeons aren’t thought-about majestic, however I like linking them again to the Renaissance dove as a logo of freedom, flight, love,” Johnson displays. “Right here, they change into a part of these New York scenes, glorifying the on a regular basis issues we transfer by way of and overlook.”
Though rooted within the day by day crossings of a chaotic metropolis like New York, Johnson’s work are equally grounded in artwork historical past, significantly the Renaissance pursuit of construction, perspective and order inside flux. His compositions reveal an impulse to find stability amid movement, to stabilize chaos by way of pictorial intelligence and to insert modern life into the lengthy lineage of portray as a report of a society in continuous changing into. Nonetheless, he resists the mathematical precision of Renaissance masters. Blurring the traces turns into his means of acknowledging the imprecision that emerges from psychological expertise—the identical human clumsiness early painters sought to good however that fashionable thinkers like Freud and Jung compelled us to confront. “It’s extra just like the flutter of a thought or a reminiscence—one thing fleeting that may’t be totally held. That’s what the pigeons or doves signify to me: the impossibility of fully capturing reminiscence. I’m attempting to strengthen my compositions and see the place the work can stretch,” he displays. For Johnson, the present marks 5 years of labor reaching a sharper imaginative and prescient whereas opening into its subsequent section.
Notably, though Johnson could draw inspiration from each private and collective archival images, he by no means ties the ultimate portray to a single picture. “I exploit pictures as a place to begin, however then I shift away from documentation,” he explains. He lately began utilizing A.I. to direct his personal visible world as a substitute. “I construct scenes from reminiscence, music and instinct. That means, I’m not certain by copyright or one other photographer’s imaginative and prescient; I’m constructing my very own. That’s how I start discovering my very own narrative,” he says. “The actual choices occur within the portray. There’s all the time a rigidity between management and give up, between construction and improvisation. I believe that battle is seen within the work.”
The emotional, usually intuitive character that shapes his photos and their reminiscences stays much more essential for Johnson and it emerges by way of the dialectical rigidity between parts. “I’m following the emotional logic. The sentiments of the figures are important and that’s the place slowness is available in. I need you to finally learn the emotion on the floor of the portray, in how the figures work together.”
Portray turns into a web site of discovery—a clean area during which he teases out what actually issues to him: colour principle, area, our bodies, rhythm, materiality. “I’m all the time asking, how does the paint really feel for the viewer? How do I keep beneficiant with texture, gesture and floor? How do I inform my story?” Motion and blurring in Johnson’s imagery reveal his effort to seize each the sensory and the psychological, the bodily world and the interior world, concurrently. Even when his figures will not be overtly interacting, they continue to be engaged in dialog—with themselves, with their environment or with time.
Not too long ago, Johnson has been reflecting on the notion of the subaltern—the unvoiced. “How can we give voice to the unvoiced?” he asks, revealing his curiosity in peripheral scenes, folks shifting by way of life half-seen. “These references sit at the back of my thoughts as I paint. Who will get to talk? Who will get seen? How does a portray maintain area for them?” This query—tips on how to choreograph a human second that’s each bodily and psychological, inside and exterior—sits on the core of his painterly inquiry. What fascinates him is that even when individuals are collectively, they continue to be alone. “That’s the character of town: we transfer facet by facet, however internally we’re some other place,” he says.
“You possibly can see her ready. You possibly can see her considering. You possibly can really feel that she’s fascinated with one thing,” Johnson says, pointing to the portray Doo Wop Thang (2025), during which a lady sits in profile, head resting on her hand, eyes half-closed in deep thought—a suspended psychological area of introspection. Rendered in muted grays and browns, with delicate highlights on her pores and skin, the determine seems each current and distant. Behind her, two different ladies sit in shadow, silent witnesses to this interior drama but unable to enter it. “That’s what I like—these work are difficult as a result of everybody in them is pondering, everyone seems to be on their means someplace. They’re not performing for us, they’re not involved with being seen. They’re in their very own area, in their very own ideas. That interior world is what pursuits me.”
What’s particularly notable about this explicit portray is that it’s the one one within the exhibition the place the determine truly has pupils. “That’s new for me. Often, I go away the eyes extra summary, extra nameless,” Johnson explains. “However right here, I gave her pupils very deliberately, as a result of I consider the eyes maintain a lot of an individual’s soul.”
A pair of smaller works on the identical wall—Concord & Discord (2025) and The Center (2025)—share the identical psychological density as the remainder of the present but stand aside visually. They’re the one work with a noticeably brighter palette and a extra structured, cinematic composition, evoking a scene that would have been filmed within the American South, as recommended by each the sunshine gradient and the themes themselves. “In these two work, the colours have shifted,” Johnson acknowledges, explaining that they have been the final works accomplished whereas getting ready for the exhibition. “The compositions change into extra tethered to pure gentle, creating ambiance. Lots of that is new for me—even the symbols,” he notes.
In one of many work, a gaggle of Black males wearing fits stands in an open subject beneath an unlimited sky, their expressions solemn, introspective, virtually ceremonial—as if they’re about to play or communicate or course of collectively. Your complete scene hums with quiet, anticipatory rigidity, a way that one thing is about to occur. “I began fascinated with drums—not actually, however as a metaphor for rhythm,” Johnson explains. In the identical means, rhythm constructions the work themselves: sharp, staccato marks like percussive beats and lengthy drips of paint that act as sustained, resonant tones.
Johnson admits there could also be connections to the Nice Migration and his personal upbringing, even when they floor solely subconsciously within the work. “My grandparents have been from Louisiana. I grew up within the Black Baptist church. I keep in mind sitting within the pews—listening to the piano, the swell of voices, the thump of the kick drum hitting your chest,” he remembers, pondering how these deeply bodily sensations of sound is likely to be translated into paint. The query—and the disaster—of portray lies in trying to transform such multisensory, fleeting experiences into picture. “These reminiscences swim by way of my thoughts. They form how the work feels even when I’m not illustrating a particular reminiscence,” he displays. Folks usually learn these scenes as processions, jazz bands and church gatherings, however he resists tying them down. “I’d reasonably the query keep open,” he says.
Right here we perceive that the rhythm Johnson describes is just not solely musical—it’s also temporal and psychological. It’s the oscillation between previous and current, actuality and fiction, reminiscence and creativeness that animates the floor of his work. That fixed motion is what retains the pictures alive and porous, able to returning, dissolving, reforming—simply as reminiscence does within the thoughts.
For that reason, Johnson agrees, his work is greatest understood as a type of psychological figuration. The figures are recognizable, however the area round them is deliberately fluid. “My curiosity is within the center floor between figuration and abstraction—the place the portray lives in a state of changing into and undoing,” he explains. “That in-between is the unconscious. That’s the place reminiscence, identification and picture collide.”
What finally emerges from these works is the persistence of reminiscence past the current second: the opportunity of archetypal patterns reappearing in open, unfolding narratives. On this sense, Johnson’s work are timeless and common of their capacity to acknowledge the fluid nature of existence as a part of an unlimited, interwoven refrain of cyclical forces—emotional, cultural and historic—that form human life throughout time and area.
Extra in Artists
