Rinso, from Portfolio I, is a dense and confrontational composition that distills Jean-Michel Basquiat’s fascination with advertising, language, and cultural power into a single, graffiti-charged field. Set against a stark black ground, the image is animated by frenetic white and electric-blue line work, punctuated with flashes of red and ochre that give the surface an urgent, almost chalkboard-like immediacy.

At the center and across the composition, Basquiat appropriates the commercial soap brand “RINSO,” layering it with fractured slogans, diagrams, arrows, and scrawled figures. Phrases such as “1950 RINSO: THE GREATEST DEVELOPMENT IN SOAP HISTORY,” “SLOGAN,” and “WHITE WASHING ACTION” collapse advertising language into pointed social commentary. What initially reads as product promotion quickly mutates into a critique of mass marketing, historical erasure, and the mechanisms by which language cleans, disguises, or rebrands truth.

Basquiat’s recurring visual lexicon—crowned motifs, mask-like faces, skeletal heads, and simplified human forms—appears throughout, rendered with deliberate crudeness that resists polish or resolution. The exaggerated mouth and staring eyes suggest both consumption and speech, reinforcing the tension between voice and control, individuality and conformity. The surface feels worked and revised, with crossings-out and repetitions that mirror the artist’s process of thinking aloud.

As part of Portfolio I, Rinso exemplifies Basquiat’s ability to turn the detritus of popular culture into a charged site of meaning. The work operates simultaneously as image, text, and argument—an incisive reflection on race, power, and the seductive authority of commercial language within modern society. For more information or to buy Jean-Michel Basquiat's Rinso, contact our New York and London galleries using the form below.