Devin B. Johnson Paints the Space Between Memory and Motion

Devin B. Johnson’s paintings emerge on the canvas like ghostly, dreamlike apparitions—visual remnants that withstand the slow erosion of memory. His scenes exist in suspended tension between figuration and abstraction, between the sensory intensity of trauma and the blurred contours of a dream upon waking, when the self begins drifting away from the oneiric realm where the subconscious speaks. In his hands, paint becomes a means of reattuning and reconstructing that space; the white canvas, a stage on which to confront it.

“My interest is in memory and the subconscious; that’s why the paintings feel articulated in fragments,” Johnson tells Observer as we walk through his new exhibition “Crossing,” on view at Nicodim Gallery through November 8. For Johnson, painting is a way to think about nostalgic space. That’s where his muted tonal range comes from: the grays, the desaturated chromatic colors, the atmospheric haze. Blending realism with surreal gesture, his work becomes a poetic act of recollection and reconnection or an attempt to retrieve what lingers beneath the surface of consciousness and the past. With his paintings, he navigates histories of representation, urban movement and diasporic trauma, moving fluidly between the personal and the collective, the remembered and the forgotten. “They evoke that phenomenon of recollection—how remembering actually works,” he says. “When you remember something, especially something emotionally loaded, it’s always fragmented. It’s never a perfect replay of how it happened.”

Johnson instinctively manipulates both subject and surface, allowing shifts in texture and color to translate psychological and sensory transitions. Yet his scenes are intentionally never fully resolved, either pictorially or narratively. They remain open, as if capturing memory and history still in motion, still forming. Fragmentation becomes a strategy: opening an event or image to multiple readings and avoiding the authority of a single interpretation. “Leaning into that fragmentation is how I like to think about reality itself: how it falls apart or reforms in this hazy, almost musical way. Memory isn’t linear; it dissolves and recomposes,” he explains.

What Johnson evokes in many of the works on view is also something profoundly specific: the daily psychological, cognitive and emotional reality of living in a city like New York: a continuous crossing of narratives, languages, cultures and perspectives that defines the urban condition. The city, always in flux, holds the potential for constant reinterpretation but also the risk of overexposure, where experience multiplies faster than we can process or reflect and meaning slips through the cracks of noise and speed.

“All of us who’ve walked the streets or subway stations can recall how certain walls or corners slowly change over time. That speaks to a kind of kinetic, haptic memory embedded in any metropolitan space,” Johnson reflects. “There are always people moving through it, navigating it. That movement creates a constant layering of memory.”

In this sense—aligned with Situationist thinking, which calls for a creative and critical interpretation of urban space that reclaims agency—the city becomes a palimpsest of visions and sensations. It is a living surface upon which we build our daily reality and our idea of self within and between the interrelational fabric of existence that a metropolis intensifies.

“My work really comes from walking the streets—an observational way of looking,” Johnson continues. “I’m constantly moving through the city with my head turning, watching how the urban environment comes together.” For him, beauty can be found anywhere: in a garage, an alley, a wall. “If you’re open to it, you can glean beauty from the most ordinary places.” His paintings speak to this practice of observation, contemplation and attunement and of locating beauty within the chaos of urban life.

At the same time, these works often describe and inhabit a state of transition: a conversation just beginning and left suspended, a movement in the street not yet resolved, a possible encounter merely suggested. The viewer is invited to imagine its unfolding. “The liminality of going from one point to another—that in-between state—is central to my work,” Johnson says. The exhibition title, “Crossing,” speaks directly to that threshold: the moment when there is an A, but the B has not yet revealed itself. “It’s the space of transition, of becoming, and painting becomes a way to simulate that threshold.”

Here, we can also read Johnson’s effort to push against the static nature of painting, suggesting instead a physical and psychological reality of being that is always in flux. “That’s often my entry point: creating figures walking through emotional and psychological space,” he explains. From this interrelational, ever-moving condition arises the universality of his scenes. “These could be New York City, Paris, Africa or anywhere,” he observes. “There’s a kind of universal ‘somewhere’ we all recognize, even if it’s not tied to a specific location.” It is a place where humanity manifests in an epiphanic moment of revelation.

In the two largest paintings in the show, Crossing (2025) and All Stay Behind (2025), this internal tension becomes fully visible: a friction between the precise rendering of figures and the intuitive eruption of sensation, which disrupts any linear narrative and opens the image to the kinds of contradictions that shape our perception of reality: the gap between what we experience, what we are told and what we can articulate within the limits of language and reason.

Johnson explains that these two paintings were the first he made for the exhibition and they set the heartbeat of the entire show. He usually begins by working through ideas slowly, often without fully understanding what he is trying to do, but each painting helps him tease out the direction, the energy and the questions that the body of work will confront. “You can see what I’m speaking about—this navigation through space, this kinetic energy. It’s not only in the dripping of the paint, but also in the way energy clusters across the canvas,” Johnson notes. The painting he refers to, Crossing, is one of the largest he has ever made and the central work from which the exhibition takes its title.

This monumental canvas depicts a vast urban street in flux, traversed by multiple lives, their stories possibly intersecting or weaving together for an instant or missing each other entirely. Several Black men walk past a white car, or perhaps it is one subject duplicated, suggesting motion and psychological multiplicity. White doves hover and drip overhead, producing a layered image that evokes movement, memory and simultaneity within the city. “This painting is also about configuration and tension—pushing paint, pushing material and at the same time allowing the material to act freely,” he says. “Letting the paint drip makes the work feel like it hasn’t fully arrived yet. It’s still becoming. That unfinished quality feels truthful to me, like memory, like movement, like life in the city itself.”

Yet Johnson is equally interested in inserting anchors—symbolic presences that connect fleeting urban moments to a larger human history where psychological and historical patterns recur. Unsurprisingly, he has recently been drawn to the thinking of Carl Jung. “What’s been interesting for me lately is using symbols as anchors,” he notes. “Jung talks about iconoclastic symbols or totems—forms that can point to personal, individual meaning. I started incorporating symbols that hold significance to me personally, but can also open the painting to other interpretations.” In the central painting, cars and pigeons serve as archetypal symbols. “Pigeons aren’t considered majestic, but I like linking them back to the Renaissance dove as a symbol of freedom, flight, love,” Johnson reflects. “Here, they become part of these New York scenes, glorifying the everyday things we move through and overlook.”

Although rooted in the daily crossings of a chaotic city like New York, Johnson’s paintings are equally grounded in art history, particularly the Renaissance pursuit of structure, perspective and order within flux. His compositions reveal an impulse to locate balance amid motion, to stabilize chaos through pictorial intelligence and to insert contemporary life into the long lineage of painting as a record of a society in continual becoming. Still, he resists the mathematical precision of Renaissance masters. Blurring the lines becomes his way of acknowledging the imprecision that emerges from psychological experience—the same human clumsiness early painters sought to perfect but that modern thinkers like Freud and Jung compelled us to confront. “It’s more like the flutter of a thought or a memory—something fleeting that can’t be fully held. That’s what the pigeons or doves represent to me: the impossibility of completely capturing memory. I’m trying to strengthen my compositions and see where the work can stretch,” he reflects. For Johnson, the show marks five years of work reaching a sharper vision while opening into its next phase.

Notably, although Johnson may draw inspiration from both personal and collective archival photographs, he never ties the final painting to a single image. “I use photography as a starting point, but then I shift away from documentation,” he explains. He recently started using A.I. to direct his own visual world instead. “I build scenes from memory, music and intuition. That way, I’m not bound by copyright or another photographer’s vision; I’m building my own. That’s how I begin finding my own narrative,” he says. “The real decisions happen in the painting. There’s always a tension between control and surrender, between structure and improvisation. I think that fight is visible in the work.”

The emotional, often intuitive character that shapes his images and their memories remains far more crucial for Johnson and it emerges through the dialectical tension between elements. “I’m following the emotional logic. The feelings of the figures are essential and that’s where slowness comes in. I want you to eventually read the emotion on the surface of the painting, in how the figures interact.”

Painting becomes a site of discovery—a blank space in which he teases out what truly matters to him: color theory, space, bodies, rhythm, materiality. “I’m always asking, how does the paint feel for the viewer? How do I stay generous with texture, gesture and surface? How do I tell my story?” Movement and blurring in Johnson’s imagery reveal his effort to capture both the sensory and the psychological, the physical world and the inner world, simultaneously. Even when his figures are not overtly interacting, they remain engaged in conversation—with themselves, with their surroundings or with time.

Recently, Johnson has been reflecting on the notion of the subaltern—the voiceless. “How do we give voice to the voiceless?” he asks, revealing his interest in peripheral scenes, people moving through life half-seen. “Those references sit in the back of my mind as I paint. Who gets to speak? Who gets seen? How does a painting hold space for them?” This question—how to choreograph a human moment that is both physical and psychological, interior and exterior—sits at the core of his painterly inquiry. What fascinates him is that even when people are together, they remain alone. “That’s the nature of the city: we move side by side, but internally we’re somewhere else,” he says.

“You can see her waiting. You can see her contemplating. You can feel that she’s thinking about something,” Johnson says, pointing to the painting Doo Wop Thang (2025), in which a woman sits in profile, head resting on her hand, eyes half-closed in deep thought—a suspended psychological space of introspection. Rendered in muted grays and browns, with soft highlights on her skin, the figure appears both present and distant. Behind her, two other women sit in shadow, silent witnesses to this inner drama yet unable to enter it. “That’s what I love—these paintings are complicated because everyone in them is thinking, everyone is on their way somewhere. They’re not performing for us, they’re not concerned with being seen. They’re in their own space, in their own thoughts. That inner world is what interests me.”

What’s especially notable about this particular painting is that it’s the only one in the exhibition where the figure actually has pupils. “That’s new for me. Usually, I leave the eyes more abstract, more anonymous,” Johnson explains. “But here, I gave her pupils very intentionally, because I believe the eyes hold so much of a person’s soul.”

A pair of smaller works on the same wall—Harmony & Discord (2025) and The Middle (2025)—share the same psychological density as the rest of the show yet stand apart visually. They are the only paintings with a noticeably brighter palette and a more structured, cinematic composition, evoking a scene that could have been filmed in the American South, as suggested by both the light gradient and the subjects themselves. “In these two paintings, the colors have shifted,” Johnson acknowledges, explaining that they were the last works completed while preparing for the exhibition. “The compositions become more tethered to natural light, creating atmosphere. A lot of this is new for me—even the symbols,” he notes.

In one of the paintings, a group of Black men dressed in suits stands in an open field beneath a vast sky, their expressions solemn, introspective, almost ceremonial—as if they are about to play or speak or process together. The entire scene hums with quiet, anticipatory tension, a sense that something is about to happen. “I started thinking about drums—not literally, but as a metaphor for rhythm,” Johnson explains. In the same way, rhythm structures the paintings themselves: sharp, staccato marks like percussive beats and long drips of paint that act as sustained, resonant tones.

Johnson admits there may be connections to the Great Migration and his own upbringing, even if they surface only subconsciously in the work. “My grandparents were from Louisiana. I grew up in the Black Baptist church. I remember sitting in the pews—hearing the piano, the swell of voices, the thump of the kick drum hitting your chest,” he recalls, pondering how those deeply physical sensations of sound might be translated into paint. The question—and the catastrophe—of painting lies in attempting to convert such multisensory, fleeting experiences into image. “Those memories swim through my mind. They shape how the work feels even if I’m not illustrating a specific memory,” he reflects. People often read these scenes as processions, jazz bands and church gatherings, but he resists tying them down. “I’d rather the question stay open,” he says.

Here we understand that the rhythm Johnson describes is not only musical—it is also temporal and psychological. It is the oscillation between past and present, reality and fiction, memory and imagination that animates the surface of his paintings. That constant movement is what keeps the images alive and porous, capable of returning, dissolving, reforming—just as memory does in the mind.

For this reason, Johnson agrees, his work is best understood as a kind of psychological figuration. The figures are recognizable, but the space around them is intentionally fluid. “My interest is in the middle ground between figuration and abstraction—where the painting lives in a state of becoming and undoing,” he explains. “That in-between is the subconscious. That’s where memory, identity and image collide.”

What ultimately emerges from these works is the persistence of memory beyond the present moment: the possibility of archetypal patterns reappearing in open, unfolding narratives. In this sense, Johnson’s paintings are timeless and universal in their ability to acknowledge the fluid nature of existence as part of a vast, interwoven chorus of cyclical forces—emotional, cultural and historical—that shape human life across time and space.

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