Article
5/02/25

Leasho Johnson: The Rupture of Abstraction

written by James Oscar Jr

"As if ashamed or bewildered,
he should recognize such beauty—
the nobility of their becoming" 
“Nearby Bushes,”  Kei Miller

Leasho Johnson’s “An unmistakable softness” at TERN gallery in Nassau, Bahamas, presents a world of shifting forms and unstable presences as the portrayed figures in his canvases emerge and dissolve between movement and stillness, between retrograde movement and the full-throttle.

Johnson’s work resonates deeply with the concept of the Body Without Organs (BwO), a theory introduced by Antonin Artaud and later expanded by Deleuze and Guattari*. The BwO offers a philosophical framework deeply resonant with Johnson’s aesthetic and speaks to states liberated from the constraints imposed by societal, biological, and psychological "organizing" forces. Artaud writes: “When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatisms and restored him to his true freedom.” Freedom from an existence bound by a fixed notion of identity.

This concept manifests in several key works. In Desire, too, is the discovery of beauty as miraculous (2025) we have an aesthetic of fragmentation, forms broken apart and overlaid onto composite visual assemblages. A black silhouette dominates, with jagged, irregular edges contrasting with the fluidity of loose brushstrokes, yet deliberate in gradients of green and blue tones. The figure is distinct and anchors the surrounding composition while the busy background presents an ambiguous form hovering between being and dissolution, at once a presence and a cavity of the void within the larger, flowing ecosystem of brushstrokes. The work evokes ‘Anansi,’ a character often alluded to in Johnson’s work, the Afro-Caribbean trickster spider, whose changeling and recombinatory body emerges and re-emerges.

The silhouette’s vague form evokes both human and more-than-human qualities, suggesting transfiguration or chimera and lacking a coherent structure remains fluid, "incomplete," and infinitely generative. This ambiguous character not only resists categorization but also anchors the surrounding composition, setting the stage for the radiating brushstrokes.

This interplay between emergence and erasure, flow and suspension, extends beyond the silhouette itself into the very fabric of the composition. The surrounding brushstrokes, with their outward-reaching gestures, reinforce this tension, amplifying the painting’s suspended energy. Their liberated emanations radiate outward, mimicking a stalled centrifugal movement while the main subject, filled with unclear matter, is simply seated amidst the centrifugal forces.  A sense of forestalled current frames the entity and engenders a tension between dynamic presence and definitive stasis—the kinetic and the frozen, liberation and constraint, amplifying the painting’s suspended energy within a swirling entropy. Within this matrix of opposing forces, a locus of longing takes shape—an unfolding longing, caught within itself, embedded in a field of potential energy. Its inertia underscores the unresolved dynamism and thereby the painting’s unsettling energy, leaves us to question the relationship between the figure and its environment. 

This suspended tension—where movement and stillness converge—sets the stage for a deeper inquiry into how forms emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure within the painting’s dynamic field. This inertia/fluidity—where solidification and dispersal, flux and fixation, intertwine—resonates with David Bohm’s concept of enfoldment and unfoldment. This theory suggests that hidden patterns are continuously folded into the visible world, only to emerge in new configurations. Johnson’s painting becomes the site of such an unfolding – a portal, we might suggest, through which longing transforms or unravels into an active search for beauty. Such a locus of longing embodies the movement between dynamism and negation, and within this very tension, there is a desire that subtly seeps through, allowing for an intersection with the miraculous discovery of beauty.

Another example of the Body Without Organs can be found in A Wild Shape  (2025), a striking composition where a bold, curving black silhouette contrasts against a vivid, textured orange background. The ascertained figuration/disfiguration suggests anthropomorphic presence while the ambiguity amplifies the sense of alterity, shifting between the recognizable and the alien. The organic vitality of the backdrop sharply offsets the minimalistic foreground, as Johnson explores amorphous hybridity through the interplay of form and colour. The orange backdrop intensifies space for a certain scream, creating tension between a sound we cannot fully hear and its visualization on canvas. This uncanny valley of silent expression lets us feel the rawness of each stroke—the emotive force embedded in the composition.

Emerging from the crisp contrast is the palpable feeling of pent-up energy, of a readiness to pounce. This visceral potential for movement may be immediately arrested or become a liberated force. The painting's jagged, irregular edges, contrasting with the fluidity of brushstrokes, again leads us to an unsettling tension. The energy is palpable, yet the movement is deferred, leaving the viewer with a sense of a contained pulse, a potentiality to either explode or remain perpetually suspended: what is certain is that there is an intention.  The sensation of a force rested mid-breath, in a hybrid stage, does not feel like the final state for this being; rather, what necessarily comes next is a liminal space of identity. This work recalls Yve-Alain Bois' concept of the pulse in abstract painting, where balance emerges from the interplay of forces. Yet Johnson refuses this balance and resolution.

Us and No More (2025) presents a sovereign presence, with its quasi-human form embodying opacity and inviting projection. The autonomous being—proud, almost regal—appears as a liberated figure that is simultaneously unsettled and a site of transformation. Johnson moves from bestial hybridity to a sovereign presence that radiates a sense of resoluteness. The fragmented strokes within this central silhouette imply metamorphosis and interior movement. Differing from the first painting discussed, the interplay between stasis and dynamism shifts inward, giving a feeling of it being held in but also rupturing, creating contained potentiality, holding itself together and on the verge of rupture, undergoing continuous interior motion.

In Well… Stone Love (2024), the being is enveloped by a black background, an entity beyond bodily categories. The figure feels lodged in an abyss, evoking both presence and being in/with the void, as if the figure operates within a liminal, transcendent space. This disarticulated presence, hovering between form and dissolution, embodies Johnson's ongoing interrogation of form.  The collapsed, smashed composite forms at the centre seem to lack functionality, their organizational structure stripped away. The work becomes less defined, more ethereal. Spectral are the colours within the form, hinting again at an internal energy. Simultaneous emergence and dissolution give rise to a spectral synthesis, one where the visible and the void blur together. The golden arc suggests a subliminal passageway, leading to new understandings of form and void.

Story Come to Bump (2024) complicates the former work’s sense of disappearance/dissipation by introducing a double presence, dual black forms—whether voids or bodies, spectral layering or disparate elements—that are jockeying, coalescing, repelling. The black hole-like presences or overpowering mass create shadowed reflections of each other, existing as twin echoes. Unlike the previous paintings where hybrid figures maintain some degree of individual presence, here the figures are disappearing into each other. We witness an amalgamating, or an imploding. The diffuse centre appears to both fracture the two formless forms and draw them together, creating a dynamic push and pull of bodies in transformation. This creates an unresolved state that asks: Is this a fusion, a convergence, an integration or an indeterminate whole? It becomes a space where forms resist settling. Foreground and background collapse into one another, reinforcing a sense of entanglement and presenting a radical uncertainty, where the flux of longing and desire is never static but fluid, enfolding and unfolding.

Across Johnson’s paintings, the body is not fixed but perpetually manifesting and erasing itself, all while unpacking traditional structures, lingering between potentiality and its realization. Demonstrating a layered abstraction and a haunting spectrality, Johnson refuses resolution, bringing us into an infinite rapport with the ambiguous. The works become cosmo-poetic refuges that implode, explode, meld, and deconstruct. We become ensconced in this cosmos where somehow entropy and creation plot together side-by-side.

In the texture of prayer – coarse and trembling, warm and sure (2024), the curved brushstrokes dissolve into one another through the blending of colours, light, and shadow, creating an affective feeling of something numinous. A masterful interplay of forms and hues emerges as spectral layers evident in the glowing tones and blending textured lines. Each element stands as sovereign and at once relational, echoing the spectral synthesis process, where individual components coexist while contributing to a unified yet evolving system. The curves feel both organic and otherworldly. Are we being led into a spectral prayer within light?

In The act of wanting to be wanted, to be understood, to be seen, to be loved (2025), an entity is caught within the ranges of the spectral explosion—part of it or separate? This visual tension mirrors the blending of frequencies. Overlapping hues of green, yellow, and muted tones create a sense of multiple spectra. All of the painting's elements seem present, amounting to this notion of spectral synthesis through layering, merging, boundaries dissolving and reconfiguring. The spectral quality emerges through the gradients of colour, the juxtaposition of light and shadow, and the almost phantasmagorical transitions between the defined and amorphous.

In Your Softness Becomes a Liability (2025), we see forms mapped vertically whose striations float between solidity and dissolution, like the constituency of an archipelago. Distinct "islands" of form rise and fall, linked yet separate. In this layered composition, verticality is the prime architecture and defines its structure with forms ascending and descending in rhythmic patterns. The layers feel like they are building on one another through the shrubbery-like backdrop—giving a sense of stacking and overlapping. The elongated brushstrokes and organic shapes around the figure inject a verticality into the painting that imparts a sense of ascent and descent, akin to the growth patterns of plants or the strata of geological forms. Each vertical mark feels both singular and relational, but also quantum in its organization, contributing to the painting's dynamic quality. Through its fragmented juxtapositions, the at-times direct rapports between the "islands," and the overall sense of a living natural ecosystem, the work reveals how parts relate to the whole, where each could function on its own but thrives as part of an inextricable organic system of exchanges.

Each "island" operates both on its terms and as part of a federation within a dispersed but relational geography, where the visual islands of layers and strokes are distinct, yet always in conversation, mirroring the structure of a living natural ecosystem. The idea of vertical archipelagos connects to quantum physics. In quantum theory, particles exist as individual units but are also entangled with others and in quantum systems states of being overlap, blur, and evolve simultaneously. The shifting layers of the work therefore resembles a quantum entanglement with the vertical archipelago feeling alive, conceptually and visually, manifesting the interconnected nature of form and void.

Through Johnson's work, we enter a cosmos where forms do not simply exist but persist—unfolding, enfolding, and transfiguring in perpetual movement. In both Well…Stone love (2024) and Story come to bump (2024), we see his exploration deepen, as figures become increasingly spectral, moving toward an uncertainty where being and non-being become indistinguishable. These works do not present us with answers but with an ongoing, radical engagement with the ambiguous, a refusal to settle, and an insistence on the transformative potential of art as a space for reimagining selfhood beyond constraint. Johnson's work invites us into a world of perpetual metamorphosis, where longing, desire, becoming, and rupture coexist as a radical aesthetic and political force.

In Yve-Alain Bois's Formless: A User's Guide**, his concept of the "pulse" in abstraction refers to a rhythmic oscillation between opposing forces, a dynamic interplay that ultimately generates structured yet disruptive energy within a painting. Johnson, however, actively disrupts this notion. His brushwork, his refusal of intuitive gestures (the act of "going against the hand” as he says), and his engagement with erratic, almost awkward movements undermine any expectation of balance or resolution. His paintings do not "pulse" in Bois's sense; they pump and release/release and pump in a tonal/atonal manner reminiscent of his Dancehall roots. His works refuse to settle into predictable rhythms and instead sustain a jagged, raw intensity that resists any easy conclusion. Where Bois's model of abstraction posits a space where oppositional energies negotiate and stabilize, Johnson's abstraction insists on fragmentation without synthesis. His "poor abstraction" challenges the very premise of the modernist resolution, offering instead an infinite series of disruptions, misalignments, and tensions that remain in perpetual motion. This method is both aesthetic and political, refusing the aesthetic resolutions that often accompany historical erasures or ideological assimilations. Johnson's abstraction does not seek to reconcile; it seeks to unsettle.

Johnson's abstraction does not simply exist within the canon of abstract painting; it redefines it from the ground up. His work challenges the assumptions that have governed abstraction's historical trajectory, particularly the search for resolution, balance, or formal coherence. Instead, he offers an abstraction rooted in rupture, in instability, in the continual deferral of meaning. His "poor abstraction"*** is not poor in complexity or ambition; rather, it is poor in its refusal of simple refinement, its embrace of rawness, and its insistence on a fractured, unfinished, and uncontainable form of abstraction.

*. Antonin Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947).

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), in which they expand the idea, proposing that dismantling or restructuring the body’s organization allows for liberation. This liberation is not just physical but experiential, enabling the body to escape its utilitarian functions and engage with a field of potentiality. Deleuze and Guattari, discussion of sexual multiplicities is particularly relevant here, as it suggests a reconfiguration of the body’s organs to enable flows of desire that resist traditional binary or hierarchical structures.”

**. Bois, Yve-Alain, and Rosalind E. Krauss. Formless: A User's Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997.

***. Johnson’s concept.

Leasho Johnson, born in 1984, is a visual artist working primarily in painting, installation, and sculpture. He was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and raised in Sheffield, a small town on the outskirts of Negril. Johnson uses his experience growing up Black, gay, and male to explore concepts around identity within the post-colonial condition.
Working at the conjunction of painting and drawing, Leasho combines charcoal, homemade paints, and dyes straddling the line between fluidity and chance, as well as precision and improvisation. Johnson makes characters that live on the edge of perception, visible and invisible simultaneously. His work's intent is to disrupt historical, political, and social expectations of the Black queer experience..

James Oscar is a writer, art critic, curator of art and performance, and WaS graduate researcher in the sociology and anthropology of art at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique. His work resides at the intersection of experimental forms of art criticism, critical forms of community cultural engagement, innovative curatorial methods, and critical approaches in anthropological investigation studying the nexus between official governmental forms of cultural development and its rapports with sovereign forms of artists' practices, operating under the rubric of their own cultural spheres. He refined his craft by studying closely with and under the tutelage of Martiniquan poet Edouard Glissant at Cuny Grad Centre in NYC. This influence has profoundly shaped his approach. He collaborated closely with the African philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu marking his initiation into a critical thought journey at the age of 19. during this period he served as a researcher, and critical thinker,  undertaking the task of reevaluating the translation and interpretation of the work of Frantz Fanon for the foundational academic text - "Fanon's Dialectic of Experience" (Harvard, 1992)

Exhibition: An unmistakable softness