In Leasho Johnson's paintings, figures appear and disappear at the same time. The Jamaican artist, based in Chicago, is presenting his first solo exhibition in Europe this summer in Paris, centered around the character of Anansi, the clever spider from Caribbean folklore.
Anansi made the crossing. The cunning spider, hero of West African tales passed down by slaves deported to the Americas, survived the Middle Passage (the name given to the transatlantic voyage) and became a permanent fixture in Jamaican folklore. For Leasho Johnson, who grew up in Sheffield, a small town near Negril, this character became the central motif of a painting that questions what it means today to belong to a place, a culture, a body. His canvases don't illustrate folklore: they inherit it, carry it, and transpose it.
Born in 1984 in Montego Bay, trained at Edna Manley College in Kingston and then at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago, Johnson belongs to a generation of Caribbean artists who have been gaining increasing prominence on the international scene for the past five years. Winner of the 3Arts Award in 2025, exhibited the same year at the Liverpool Biennial, and with his work collected by the Pérez Art Museum in Miami and the Art Gallery of Ontario, he arrives in Paris with a solid reputation. But what is most striking about his canvases is not their institutional trajectory, but rather their strange way of simultaneously appearing and disappearing.
Leasho Johnson, Anansi and the lore of the forbidden (Anansi #28), 2024. © Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim
Look at A Perfect Camouflage to the Thunder Bulging Behind It (2026), the canvas that opens the Paris exhibition. A figure seems to advance, then retreat into the depths of the painting, half-engulfed by dark, dense vegetation. We can make out a torso, a leg, perhaps a face, but we can never be certain. The title says it all. A muted energy rumbles behind the surface, and the camouflage contains it, conceals it, makes it bearable. All of Johnson's painting resides in this fragile balance between what is revealed and what is hidden.
Leasho Johnson, A Perfect camouflage to the thunder bulging behind it, 2026. © Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim
To achieve the deep blacks that give his canvases their power, the artist employs a unique method. He typically rejects manufactured pigments and makes his own blacks from charcoal derived from burnt wood. This act is not merely material; it is also political. Aware of the colonial histories embedded in the very notion of blackness, Johnson refuses to treat black as an abstract color or a symbolic category. He transforms it into a living material, working it in successive layers using stencils until he obtains textured surfaces that seem to breathe.
The stakes are high. Johnson is Black, gay, and from an island where male homosexuality remains legally criminalized by an 1864 colonial law still in effect, even if it is no longer enforced in practice. Appearing or disappearing depending on the context is not an aesthetic pose for him; it is a daily experience. This is where Anansi comes from. The spider that schemes, that negotiates, that weaves its web from the margins, becomes for the artist a figure of self-portraiture. The works presented at the 2025 Liverpool Biennial, which foreshadow the Paris exhibition, clearly demonstrate this. The shrinking world (2023), Buried beyond the pasture without any names (2023): the titles speak of worlds closing in, of anonymous graves, of presences that resist all identification. And yet the canvases are never despairing. Something vibrates there, which could be anger, sensuality, or both at the same time.
Because dancehall culture, in which Johnson grew up, remains central to his work. This Jamaican music, which unfolds in the streets, in bodies, in clothing, and which largely defines masculine identity on the island, is also the one that violently rejected queer culture. Johnson appropriates its codes, postures, and attitudes, to introduce another regime of desire. His figures bear both stone and wound, armor and flesh, as the title of a recent painting, With stony hearts or with a wound (2024), so superbly expresses.
The sea is another country (2024) concludes this meditation on a broader note. In the Caribbean imagination, the sea is never simply a landscape: it is the site of the Middle Passage, and also, today, a migratory and cultural horizon. Johnson holds these two aspects together, and this is precisely what the title of his exhibition, "I am a place as much as I am a flavour," conveys. A sense of belonging that never becomes fixed, that is transmitted through cuisine, through dance, through painting. A sense of belonging that circulates, like Anansi on his canvas.
Leasho Johnson, Bumps and Brains, 2024. © Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim
“Leasho Johnson: I am a place as much as I am a flavor”
Mariane Ibrahim
18, avenue Matignon, Paris 8th
From June 6 to 25 July 2026
