The Brooklyn Rail

Marcus Jahmal’s two exhibitions at Will Shott and Market Gallery find themselves suspended, transfigured, between the leather jacket and the cross. Together, they are the drape of attitude and reflection, a disposition that suggests that the artist strikes between immolation and sacrifice. The punk is the artist’s hand and brush, while the enigmatic logic of the crucifixion is a newer occurrence, both a metonym and a suspicion of the artist’s position.

At Will Shott, there is a returned image of the pitbull, a head of sharp teeth and angular points that evokes a restless protector walking low along the fenceline. It may be a forebear to the depiction of the punk in City Rager (2025). The leather jacket bears the Crimson Ghost, the logo of the Misfits, which in many ways characterizes the moves that Jahmal uses with the brush. The white face of the ghost becomes a swirling brush, dragging wet paint through wet paint. The teeth chatter in space, as the hairs of a big brush choose speed over sharp edge and detail, keeping the pace. You can almost hear the feedback from the amp. The liberty spikes are the posture of the painting—thick, unbothered strokes that may have just as easily been done with fingers or a palette as a brush, afraid of nothing except a lull or a drag. But it isn’t just the fearlessness that’s being channeled from the punk. Beneath is Jaw Shatter (2025), an assemblage sculpture by Jahmal that bears the anti-authority stance of the punk venue. An antiquated police baton sits within a plastic sheath, with a human jaw hung at its base. The plinth of the piece is a Bottega Veneta box. To give it a semiotic read, the language of bones dispensed by the violence of the police state is inextricably tied to the luxury goods of capitalism. The bones speak without a mouth. Enjoy your retail. Nearby is another assemblage, Wild Run (2025). A Chokwe mask in a ski mask sits on top of a fox pelt draped across a skateboard.

The ski mask is the transfer. At Market Gallery, Jahmal employs it within his images of the cross. In High rise (2025), a figure in a ski mask hovers over a loosely painted push/pull grid. The umber of the figure’s body neither emerges nor recedes, and instead is static and motionless within the surface. The painting poses an interesting paradox—an anonymous Messiah, one that only suffers pain without recognition. The issues of representation and subjectivity within Black depictions come to mind, as the overrepresented and underrepresented double-bind is refused through this anonymity. Instead, Jahmal reveals a camouflaged Christ who suffers without being seen, an act of restoration but without the heroic valorization. The anonymity of sacrifice is a potent addition to the artist’s lexicon, framed against the Hans Hofmann–like background. The artist is stretched across an epochal latitude of violence. Violence, after all, allays the majoritarian viewer of their own fear of it. It is sometimes, unfortunately, a catharsis of guilt that the gallery is able to provide. So, then, who is able to purchase the pain of it, and at what cost?

The temptation to witness is a conspiracy of image circulation, one that begets more violence and more absolution of the majority that circulates it. The ski mask figured on the modernist cross may suggest that culture is the silent curator of this violence. Christ as a dead canary, and painting as a way of testing images in hopes of realizing culture’s ability to reify violence while also sustaining it. It isn’t stauromania, a manic obsession with suffering, but a reflection on Golgotha, of what is stolen, expected, and extracted from artists. Painting, significantly, doesn’t perpetuate this image circulation, and can approach these issues as a critical philosophy. Jahmal is able to question what historically has been elided and the suspicions that come with operating within it. The ski mask is occlusion and oblivion.

But there is a different aspect to the crucifixion Jahmal is after—a secular spirituality that connects painter to painter. In his show at Market Gallery, the textual framing of the work mentions Henri Matisse, and that the experience of an artist is a spiritual one. Jahmal is disinterested in framing the Black experience through the violence it suffers, a potential reification of complexity, and instead seeks to connect to his artistic ancestors. The work operates both as a political critique and a formal exegesis. Jahmal’s paintings are dedicated to material, not trying to compel it to do anything other than work with it to affect the surface of the canvas. It is anti-virtual, a rejection of the lack of touch within immediate experience. At times this is expressed through the Misfits jacket, and the artist gets on stage with nothing more than power chords and an attitude. At others, he is about to step back and interrogate the threshold of the cross. The crucifixion in Jahmal’s imagery is the physical that releases the virtual somewhere else. But ultimately, what we yearn for as transcendent is bound up within the physical realities of our bodies that navigate the crowd, the pit, and seek the deep kinship of those that came before.