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'Boreas', 2007
Mixed media collage on canvas
102 x 144 inches
'The Devil is Beating His Wife', 2003
Endpapers, billboard remnants and stencils
132 x 240 inches
Six years ago - or so goes the picaresque story of his ascent - Mark Bradford was stony broke and working at his mother's beauty parlour in South Central Los Angeles. Today, aged 45 (boosters will only be disappointed that they cannot proclaim his enviable youth), Bradford has been tagged as one of Thelma Golden's generation of "post-black" artists (after he was included in her important 1991 show, "Freestyle"), and he has just had a brief solo show at the Whitney. His secret? Novelty, says the sceptic: like many young talents in painting today, Bradford has found his metier in conjuring novel surface effects. His surfaces are thick accumulations of billboard posters which have been given new life through a loving and laborious process of bleaching, scraping, ironing, sanding and inking. In the past he has employed hair dye and fake fingernails; these are absent in New York, but the impressions he creates are still startling, and one might think of his pictures as chance collages, as canvases distressed-into-life, as surface worn and yet still fizzing with animated traces of street life.
Scepticism aside, Bradford's surfaces really are something to behold. 'Boreas' (all works 2007) is typical: a tangle of dark lines cluster at the centre of the large picture and act as cloisonné to separate and enhance the colours and textures of the papers he uncovers as he scrapes back. The lines wriggle and weave organically, seeming as if to have risen to the surface like a bloom of mould across the canvas, and they enclose various appealing textures and colours - a soft, pale, leathery hue in one area, which serves as a muted foil to the silvery backdrop which surrounds the central motif.
Although Bradford would seem to have no hard-and-fast opinions about what his abstract tangles might represent, and while the pattern of parallel lines in 'Orbit' is more reminiscent of kitchen tiling than anything else, the pattern dominating 'Ghost Money' is emphatically that of a city map, and that's no accident. For while Bradford is disinclined to allow single motifs to dominate the tableaux, as his forerunners in billboard collage, the French affichists, often did, when he does let imagery surface it serves to amplify the boom and glare of city life: "Horrorfest" says one poster creeping into view in 'Giant'; "Cash" says another. Bradford has expanded his franchise into video in previous shows, and while there are no more examples of those present at Sikkema Jenkins, he has included a stack of embellished packing boxes ('Stereo Boxes' and 'Pallet'), in the tradition of Warhol's Brillo Boxes, and these extend the urban themes of the pictures, borrowing traces of imagery from the boxes themselves and working them up into brand new surfaces, in this case bright, smooth and white surfaces reminiscent of glazed ceramic.
Fifty years ago, when the critic Clement Greenberg was surveying the new work in the galleries and trying to trace out a pattern, he was led to speculate on what were the most pressing formal, compositional problems exercising the new generation. His hunches seemed accurate, and thus they went on to shape the endeavours of many young painters. Perhaps one shouldn't be looking to do the same today, but one does, for no better reason than to do what critics do - to label and sort and trace out trends. And, doing so, one comes to the disappointed conclusion that there are simply no more pressing problems left in painting - no more struggles with the formal traditions of the medium, no more wrestling with content: in Mark Bradford's case, the affichists have done it all before, and when they did, the use of street imagery had a lot more significance. In Bradford's defense, one might point to similarities between his work and that of Julie Mehretu, or Matthew Ritchie: among them all is a shared concern with chaos, with the world's accumulation of waste and trash, with its waxing and waning reserves of energy. The question, perhaps, is whether painting has the energy left to say what needs saying.
Morgan Falconer
Mark Bradford: Nobody Jones
Until 23 February
Sikkema Jenkins
530 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
T. +1 212.929.2262 |
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Morgan Falconer is a journalist and critic. After an age spent immersed in 1920s New York as a graduate student, the result now props up his computer, and today he writes about contemporary art and culture for a variety of publications including Art Review and Modern Painters. |
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| Published on 24-01-2008 |
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