Nicodim Gallery’s New York presentation of Crossing marks Devin B. Johnson’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and represents what many are calling his most refined and introspective body of work to date. In this series, Johnson expands his ongoing dialogue with entropy, legacy, memory, and the disintegration of form, bringing these motifs into sharper focus while charting new directions for his evolving visual language.
Each canvas begins with figurative fragments — found photographs, keepsakes, and objects that carry traces of intimacy and loss. From there, Johnson immerses these foundations in textural atmospheres of layered pigment and misty transparency, creating dreamlike compositions where figures seem to hover between emergence and erasure. The result is an exploration of how memory simultaneously preserves and distorts, and how painting itself can become a kind of temporal crossing — between what has been lived, what is recalled, and what remains unresolved.
Among the standout works are “Mirror Rehearsal,” the exhibition’s opening piece, and “Harmony & Discord,” a painting steeped in deep wine tones that evokes emotional gravity through tension and balance. The more abstract “Bus Stop” and “Creep” push further toward dissolution, while the titular “Crossing” offers a fleeting cityscape filled with birds in flight and vintage cars, symbols of momentum and transience beneath a shroud of mystery.
Conceptually, Johnson situates himself within a broad intellectual lineage. His inspirations include Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, which interrogates visibility and voice; Romare Bearden’s experimental collage practice, where fragmentation becomes a mode of reconstruction; and Francesco Careri’s “Walkscapes,” which treats movement through space as an act of cultural storytelling. These influences converge into a poetic meditation on mark-making, history, and inheritance, rendering the act of painting both a physical and metaphysical process.
As curator Ben Lee Ritchie Handler notes, Crossing stands as an “ode to the presence and opacity of mark-making”, bridging personal memory and collective history. The exhibition signals Johnson’s movement beyond observation toward a new kind of vision — one where remembering itself becomes a creative force.
On view through November 8 at Nicodim Gallery, 15 Greene Street, New York, Crossing invites viewers to step into the threshold where recollection dissolves into possibility.
Ph. Devin B. Johnson / Nicodim Gallery