Leasho Johnson, A Perfect camouflage to the thunder bulging behind it, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.
Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present I am a place as much as I am a flavour, a solo exhibition by Leasho Johnson in Paris. Marking the artist’s first solo presentation in Europe and his second with the gallery, the exhibition brings together a new body of work in which the artist continues his exploration of Jamaican folklore through the figure of Anansi, the shapeshifting trickster whose transformations blur the boundaries between human and animal.
At the heart of the exhibition lies an invitation: is it possible to challenge default associations we may possess about defined blackness, and start to expand the conversation into a more layered interdisciplinary territory? Like the way we look at each other, how we construct desire, or project fear? These questions run throughout Johnson’s practice, where the queer body occupies a luscious and unstable central stage. Neither fixed nor fully legible, his figures emerge in states of transformation, fragmentation, and sensual performance. In Johnson’s paintings, recognizable traces of human forms resist stable definition, moving fluidly between animal, cartoon, and spirit.
Johnson leads the viewer into dense and psychologically charged spaces that recall both the lush vegetation of Jamaica and the claustrophobic intensity of contemporary urban life. From these darkened landscapes emerge silhouettes that oscillate between eroticism and threat. Faces dissolve into shadow, limbs stretch and morph. Bodies remain partially concealed as opacity becomes a strategy of survival. The figures are never entirely available to the viewer.
This ambiguity is echoed materially through the artist’s approach to color. Concerned with the colonial histories embedded within blackness, Johnson frequently constructs the color black himself rather than relying on manufactured pigments. Charcoal, made from burnt wood, becomes central to his process, allowing him to build deeply textured surfaces. Through this methodology, black ceases to function as a fixed symbolic category — something acquired, circulated, or consumed — and instead becomes a living material carrying its own history and transformation onto the canvas.
Born in Jamaica and now based in Chicago, Johnson draws deeply from Caribbean storytelling traditions surrounding Anansi, a folkloric trickster figure historically used to project human desires, contradictions, and anxieties onto animal forms. Anansi’s humor, distortion, exaggeration, and masquerade allow the artist to navigate questions of race, sexuality, and belonging through a visual language that is simultaneously playful and unsettling. Much like the trickster itself, the paintings refuse singular interpretation, inhabiting instead a shifting territory open to contradictions and doubt, light and darkness.
