The Brooklyn Rail

Joe Bradley’s paintings in his exhibition Vom Abend at David Zwirner feel walked out. There are moments within each of his riven landscapes that his painting feels like a long trek, a hike without a compass or a map packed in the gear. They don’t go the quickest route, as Bradley avoids large brushes and bravura that engage the body. Instead, he gleans along the monumental surfaces at a forager’s pace. Childlike colors are divided into segmented territories, delineated with round and chip brushes, that form the borders of each zone. Bradley sidesteps conventions like illusionistic space or direct reference and instead suspends our recognition of what we perceive somewhere in the unformed. The paintings are suspicious of things coming or going, front to back, and their ambition seems to be towards coloring book pages, comic panels, or maps. They are territorialized, into passages of over-under, forming checkered windows in the thick of it, and resting lightly on the way a line can segment and imply there’s something underneath to be revealed. But the trapped areas often don’t form space and instead feel like fields of co-present marks. Adjacency and proximity, rather than mixing or fulfilling anything, are emphasized. In fact, it is Bradley’s many acts of avoidance that give the works their credence. Bradley’s painterly glossolalia finds innovation within narrow corridors, and abstraction through distance.

Bradley has often communicated his love of comics, like those by Rory Hayes and R. Crumb. He keeps their lines, but not their tones. He drops the power chords of their graphic edge and swaps them out for night time serenades. It reminds me of when Patti Smith once sang “You Light Up My Life” to a room of children, atonal and off-balance but capable of stunning everyone into silence because of how unexpected it was, like a joke being met with silence. The guy who painted Superman symbols on raw canvas, the painter who “lowered the bar” for other painters, is now trying to create a space for silence and maybe trying to remind us of how innocent we all once were. What does that mean for Bradley to flirt with making a nocturne, perhaps with a Pac-Man painted at the bottom of it? On that note, it’s hard to tell how peaceful the paintings really are. Occident (2023-24) feels twisted in the center, a map of the West with a figure on the right possibly being kicked by a phantom boot as a garden on the left flaps in the wind.

The title of the exhibition could just as easily refer to the best times to make paintings like these. There’s something about them that suggests that they could be made during the fading early morning hours. Maybe it is how undisturbed by the outside world they seem that makes them feel like they are accomplished late in the night with some kind of distant music going. Everything is planned out during the day, especially in the city, down to our acts of sociability; but at night things go unplanned and it's easier to become stranded, from others and yourself. So many of the best/worst moves happen in the middle of the night when no one is up to talk you down from the way you’re feeling. Daylight color has to be remembered in the darkness and there it becomes generalized. Whenever they are painted, the paintings communicate the artist’s ability to shut out the world and deal with the thing in front of him and follow the forming shape of their belief.

As any abstract painter will tell you, it is difficult to make something distinctive without relying on a gimmick, like new material or synthetic colors. In fact, there’s something about painting out clichés in this body of Bradley’s work, or animating them. Clichés start with an optimism of assumption, a surmised and fragile “we” that looks for congregants through their simplicity. The shapes of trees and mountains make invitational landscapes while the “I could do that” notion has you painting in your mind. Hash Eater (2023-24) might be the depiction of an invisible hammer smashing out the landscape beyond it, obliterating the vista or the idyll we expect. Angel’s Trumpet (2023-24) begins with a pink Venus of Willendorf as its starting point, and there’s something about the vertical space of the composition that really works for the array of methods Bradley uses to negotiate the surface. It is a generalized abstraction but somehow, carefully, misses any direct reference. The magic trick of it is how familiar it gets to other ideas of New York school painting while not quite reaching them. Bradley stubs his toe on modernist painting in two ways–using small brushes and painting with little medium, two important acts of avoidance that really make the work distinctive. Maybe this is painting as slapstick, like Buster Keaton safely through the window of the falling house frame. Almost, almost, almost. Flat Earth (2023-24) reveals the kind of humor of barely being missed, as a yellow banana seems to be sketched out in the flat, abandoned just as it’s born.

Another almost exists in the looming contradiction of the paintings, in how insouciant they are. Bradley paints on the canvases unstretched, cropping them at the very end. This leaves the borders of the painting up-for-grabs, improvisational, while the center is really the gravity of their composition. His color is often unmixed; meaning, you won’t find a gradient in these canvases. Instead, they are staged as theaters of color lined up along loose edges. Bradley piles up the paint before scraping it back down. They look like they should be more textured, but the scraping makes them uncertain. Distressed is what the artist prefers. All of this to say, this makes them a little more hard-won than provisional. What’s communicated is a back and forth of generosity and undoing. They aren’t like the tabula rasa drop cloths or the irreverence Bradley became known for in the “Schmagoo” paintings, these are edge to edge. For that matter, Bradley wields abstract languages like philosophers wield ideas—they are used until they are all used up. It isn’t that they are disproven, it is that they give way to something else entirely.

Why this show, these paintings, from Bradley at Zwirner now? If painting, specifically abstract painting, can be understood as beginning with an issue and then becoming an experience of the painter’s desire, what is it that Bradley desires? Maybe it is a restless exhaustion of narrative. His paintings over the years have stayed a moving target, like there is some kind of challenge to undo each previous series with something familiar, but different enough. I think it is a thrill to pull something off within limitation, making something distinct within means available to everyone else. It is Bradley’s adoption and dropping of abstract languages that prevents it from being categorized with David Geers’s Neo-Formalism. It is anti-style, which makes it miss the critique of being too palatable, and Bradley’s ability to drift through abstraction is what makes it vital. Bifo Berardi has called for poetry to be the resistance to the economic fabrications of endless growth and debt; recognizing that there is power in making language itself insolvent and unfamiliar. Bradley’s show may be trying to give room to never professionalize but perhaps as its highest compliment, there’s nothing to see here.