Rashid Johnson

Good Love

The wooden flooring used in Good Love is reoriented to the wall, serving as a canvas for incised and branded marks. Rashid Johnson explores materiality in his abstracted mixed media works, employing black soap as a meaningful agent. Black soap, often used in Black skin care products along with shea butter, has been melted, poured, and burned onto Johnson’s grainy surface. The composition which features balanced geometric shapes, both reduces and transforms ideas of Blackness.

While actions of scratching and branding the wooden structure appear destructive, the waxy black substance, valued for its cleansing and healing properties, counters the violence.