Untitled

“I don’t like to hear people’s elaborate excuses for making art, so I don’t try to make any myself... there’s no way of telling what people think or what’s coming across.” -Joe Bradley


Joe Bradley’s critical success of the past few years has led to his work being described by one Museum of Modern Art curator as “post-Internet” painting (P. Schjeldahl, “Take Your Time: New Painting at the Museum of Modern Art," New Yorker, 5 January 2015). The artist’s applications of large gestural swaths of paint celebrate a return to the drama of painting, a renaissance of sorts after decades of languishing as an artistic medium. Unusually, this celebration continues on the reverse of the canvas as the verso is also marked with paint, meaning that at different points in its making both the front of the back of the work were in contact with the floor of Bradley’s studio, accumulating what the artist refers to as "schmutz" or "studio grit." The hand-drawn circles in primary colors of red, blue and yellow on the verso bleed through to the side that Bradley designated as the front of the painting, itself comprised of areas saturated with eggplant purples and earth tones of differing colors, and mustard yellow on top of sky and sea blue. The result is what the art critic Phong Bui called “a certain sense of accumulative palimpsests, which probably require painting from behind the canvas surface to bleed through, in order to accommodate the painted image that more or less monopolizes the center of the canvas” (P. Bui, “Joe Bradley to Phong Bui,” The Brooklyn Rail, 3 February 2011).

Bradley described his process to Bui as follows: “Most of the painting is done with the canvas on the floor. I begin painting, and then at a certain point flip it over and see what the other side looked like. With this thin canvas the oil paint bled through, and sometimes the bleed-through would suggest something. It’s a satisfying way of making a painting. You feel like really getting inside the thing. And working on a painting while it’s lying flat, you become less aware of how it will work compositionally. You don’t get hung up on how the upper left hand corner looks, you know?” (J. Bradley, Ibid.).

Untitled is a radical departure from the canvases Bradley showed at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, where he arranged the square and rectangular canvases that he stretched with vinyl to look like Minimalists monochromes into the angular shape of animals and people. Bradley moved on from the modular monochromatic canvas-creatures because “there wasn't a lot of play involved once formal decisions were made. I wanted the freedom that a painter has to let anything happen in the space of a rectangle” (J. Bradley quoted in Y. Wallin, “Cave Painter: Joe Bradley,” Art in America, 5 January 2011). The same year, Bradley painted the Schmagoo paintings. Emblems like a Christian fish, a cross, a stick figure person and Superman’s “S” logo drawn in grease pencil on canvas. Bradley said of the Schmagoo paintings, named for a slang term for heroin, “Some of them were lifted, like the Christ fish in the mouth of a larger fish. That one is sort of a direct lift from a Philip K. Dick drawing. In his Exegesis, he has these little sketches, and that was one I thought was really powerful. I was also on a Christ kick. Have you ever seen the movie Godspell, where the Christ character is wearing a Superman T-shirt?” (J. Bradley quoted in “Joe Bradley,” Interview, 16 May 2013).

Untitled also has its origins in the The Mouth and Foot Paintings of 2011, where the artist kept raw canvas on the floor to accumulate dust, footprints and other markings before adding scrawling marks and loose patches of color and symbols reminiscent of Jean Debuffet, Art Brut, and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings. Next came Epiphany, a sculptural tangle of computer cords and other material the artist made in collaboration with Dan Colen in 2012. Bradley said of his process, “I don’t like repeating myself, so something will become a trope in the studio and it just starts to bug you” (J. Bradley quoted in A. Russeth, “Joe Bradley: Mr. Schmagoo,” W Magazine, 3 November 2015).

Laura Hoptman, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, included Bradley in her 2014-2015 exhibition The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World at MoMA because she said his work is representative of a trend in painting since the advent of the Internet. It is impossible to pinpoint paintings like Bradley’s in time; instead, Bradley samples styles from the history of art, pulling from a diverse set of sources including Abstract Expressionism, street culture, graffiti, agitprop and alternative art histories like Chicago’s surrealist contingent, the Hairy Who. Critic Andrew Russeth sums up Bradley’s major achievement in the field of painting: “While so many artists struggle to conceive a single trademark style, he toys with a handful of them. The resulting paintings can be beautiful, but they are always tinged with a wry irreverence or a distance” (Ibid.). Instead of cultivating a personal style, Bradley paints holistically: “Painting can also be too earnest at times and that's a drag. You don't want to go in that direction either. It should be holistic. It should represent the whole of your personality, I guess, so if somebody is a sincere painter or an ironic painter, then they're just bullshitting the audience and presenting only an idealized version of themselves” (Op. cit.).