(Not) Just Another Image: A Peep at a Piece from Jean-Michel Basquiat

Let’s face it: we’re soaked in some kind of screen at some point or other throughout our days. And sometimes nothing settles the sweet escape of a screen than yet another picture on a screen.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, a supernova of the eighties, created a world where dreams and visions of them collide. In his paintings, words sprawl across canvases covered in colors and defiant strokes of black. He’s SAMO, but not the “Same Old Shit” his old name proclaims from his graffiti days.

Basquiat was a poet, a dreamer, a commentator, a member of the “27 Club,” and contingent to his iconic status, an artist who mixed words and paint. In 1983, Basquiat painted “Notary,” a figurative amalgam of words and images, loosely a self-portrait and largely incomplete without its words.

Breathtaking. Enigmatic. Colorful. We use words to illustrate the indescribable but sometimes the indescribable describes our words. SAMO may be dead, but the escape his art offers acts as an unintentional rabbit hole and we all fall down. This is where the magic begins.

–Camille Dourmashkin-Cagol