Serendipity is a system when it comes to life and artfully for a bookshelf. While I have always deliberately organized my books, they are in alphabetical order by solo artist exhibition or first word of a group exhibition title, and to some extent, styled my shelves by adding in artist editions, I am always excited to discover unexpected and unintended outcomes. This time, serendipity has brought together Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, Peter Nagy, and Rashid Johnson. At first, they seem to live in different corners of contemporary art. Sit with them, and a clear thread appears: each starts with a sign or system—a flag, a word, a diagram, a repeated mark—and presses it until it turns into feeling. It’s the tension between rule and residue: the structure each of these artists builds and the emotion it leaves behind.
Jasper Johns begins with “things the mind already knows”—flags, targets, numbers—and makes them strange. His surfaces are a classroom in technique and looking: waxy encaustic, embedded newsprint, edges that refuse to disappear. The point isn’t the symbol; it’s the seeing. He slows us down long enough to notice how recognition happens—how belief attaches to a pattern of stars and stripes, how a circle with rings becomes a mood. With Johns, vocabulary becomes atmosphere.
Bruce Nauman uses language as medium. Neons that loop a phrase until it contradicts itself; instructions that ask the body to comply; corridors that turn walking into awareness. There’s humor and unease here—the kind that reveals how rules shape perception. Nauman shows that a sentence can be sculpture, and a studio can be a laboratory for doubt. He reminds us that meaning isn’t only said—it’s felt when pressure is applied in the right (or wrong) place.
Peter Nagy borrows the interfaces of everyday life—floor plans, flow charts, signage, ad graphics—and turns them into critique. The images are crisp, seductive, almost corporate; the ideas are anything but. His diagrams don’t just picture systems; they expose them—how information is routed, how value is signaled, how taste is branded. Nagy is a guide to the way culture writes itself onto our eyes, and how design quietly instructs what we see and what we miss.
Rashid Johnson builds a personal language from material and repetition: black soap and shea butter, tiled mirrors, plants, shelves, the anxious face drawn again and again. The grid is a skeleton through which the mark becomes a pulse. His work carries identity, memory, vulnerability—codes that oscillate between public and private. Johnson shows how a system of signs can not just hold, but sustain life.
Together, Johns, Nauman, Nagy, and Johnson take symbols we’re sure we understand and make them newly legible. They don’t abandon the code; they stress it—so that what’s underneath can surface. The result is a reminder that art is both a translation and communication engine: from sign to self, from order to feeling.
