Alien in a Garbage Dump

‘It’s easy to see Basquiat, Guston and cave painting in [Bradley’s] messy, bold lines and weathered textures. In these large abstractions, scribbled-looking passages in bright colors are set against areas of canvas marked only with dirt … The canvases are painted on both sides, so that faint areas of flat color, visible from the back, are in dialogue with heavily painted areas on the front, which often include contrasting colors laid over each other. The result is real visual electricity’ —B. BOUCHER

‘I think that painting relates very neatly to inner travel and the exploration of inner worlds. With painting, I always get the impression that you’re sort of entering into a shared space. There’s everyone who’s painted in the past, and everyone who is painting in the present’ —J. BRADLEY


With its richly timeworn textures and vivid palimpsests of pigment, Alien in a Garbage Dump (2010) reveals Joe Bradley’s instinct for dynamic and primordial mark-making. The raw, gestural force of Bradley’s paintings, with their accumulation of marks, studio grit and intense, unmodulated colours, results from a prolonged process of thoughtful deliberation. A glyphic ochre line snakes down the canvas like a mapped road or river; scratched zones of blue and brown verge on signification, their distressed surfaces seeming etched or excavated. Ground-in accretions of dust and debris conjure a dense, arid landscape of patina. The work expresses Bradley’s concern not only for what is readily visible on the face of the canvas but also that which is buried beneath coats of paint, or even vestiges of what may lie on the canvas’s reverse. As with much of Bradley’s abstract work, its intensely worked complexity invites extended and considered viewing. As art critic and journalist Brian Boucher has said of these paintings, ‘It’s easy to see Basquiat, Guston and cave painting in their messy, bold lines and weathered textures. In these large abstractions, scribbled-looking passages in bright colors are set against areas of canvas marked only with dirt … The canvases are painted on both sides, so that faint areas of flat color, visible from the back, are in dialogue with heavily painted areas on the front, which often include contrasting colors laid over each other. The result is real visual electricity’ (B. Boucher, ‘Joe Bradley,’ in Art in America, 25 March 2011).

Seeking to expose the materiality of his resources, Bradley approaches painting in a process-driven, almost performative manner. The artist unceremoniously moves his canvas from floor to wall while employing a vast array of painterly tactics – from grand gestures to elegant automatic drawing. ‘There’s a long period of just groping around,’ he explains. ‘I usually have some kind of source material to work off of – a drawing or a found image – but this ends up getting buried in the process. Most of the painting happens on the floor, then I’ll pin them up periodically to see what they look like on the wall. I work on both sides of the painting too. If one side starts to feel unmanageable, I’ll turn it over and screw around with the other side. That was something that just happened out of being a frugal guy, I guess. But then, because I am working on unprepared canvas, I get this bleed through. The oil paint will bleed through to the other side, so I get this sort of incidental mark’ (J. Bradley, quoted R. Simonini, ‘Joe Bradley,’ The Believer, July 2012, p. 65).

Bradley’s compositions poetically tell the story of their own making. Working on unprimed canvas spread imperfectly across a simple stretcher frame, Bradley emphasises the surface creases and warps that most painters seek to eliminate with numerous coats of gesso and meticulous stretching. The unprimed canvas, left to linger on the studio floor where it acquires the dirt and debris of Bradley’s process, adds a gritty quality to the otherwise elegant simplicity of his work. From this ground emerges a palimpsest of tangible imperfections, which are as important to the artist as the canvas and paint themselves. ‘I work on them flat,’ he says. ‘I walk on them. They pick up paint and whatever else is on the floor. I like them to look really filthy’ (J. Bradley, quoted in R. Simonini, ‘Joe Bradley,’ The Believer, November-December 2012). In Alien in a Garbage Dump, the restrained arrangement of opaque colour upon patinated canvas belies an inner sophistication that is the result of its slow, considered process. As part of his working method, Bradley spends countless hours alone with a particular work, in which he makes subtle adjustments, often turning the canvas over or rotating it if he finds a particularly interesting passage. A key element of his process is the time that he spends looking at the work of other artists, which allows him to engage more fully with his own work. ‘I think that painting relates very neatly to inner travel,’ he says, ‘and the exploration of inner worlds. With painting, I always get the impression that you’re sort of entering into a shared space. There’s everyone who’s painted in the past, and everyone who is painting in the present’ (J. Bradley, quoted in L. Hoptman, ‘Art: Joe Bradley,’ Interview Magazine, 16 May 2013).