The Brooklyn Rail

I’d call it a party you’ll kick yourself for missing. You ever go to one of those mildly irresponsible apartment shindigs where you kinda-sorta know one person who may or not be there, thinking, “Oh God, what have I gotten myself into…”—only to find out, perhaps with some assistance, that you’re exactly where you’ve always needed to be? Walking through Vom Abend, Joe Bradley’s new show at David Zwirner in Chelsea, gave me the sense I was traipsing through heady conversations and the pulsation of music, following wisps of smoke with my nose like a cartoon character. It’s great enough to see a show this thoughtfully composed—there are nine oil paintings, all new, all speaking a shared tongue—at this terrifically huge scale. It’s even better to feel Bradley’s obvious joy in painting, to walk out of the gallery with nothing left to do but smile.

So what are we smiling about? Flat Earth’s an easy stop-and-see at the front end of the gallery (all works 2023–2024). A landscape by my definition, the painting’s coarse bands of leaf green and scarlet set the stage for a transitive nightfall in cerulean that wipe-transitions in from the right third. Signs and symbols crawl away from the mire: an eye, a Google Maps-style pinpoint marker, a sun and at least two moons. All is enrobed in a wide single stroke of black-or-white line. A figure in the lower third—possibly a medieval gleaner assessing the ground—meets eye-to-eye with what reminds me of Pac Man. The way things are pooled and fall into one another, it reads like an ancient map with “HERE BE DRAGONS” on the edges: you get the paranoiac sense of topology that a Flat-Earther might possess combined with the very sincere ambition of attempting to explain that topology on a two-dimensional plane. This approach carries over to Together, which plasters a filmic two-shot conversation in what might be a bathroom stall with that same dense line, a lightbulb radiating across a mix of yellow and black mottles and the fleshy Angel’s Trumpet which lets its nude-in-reverse be descended upon by Joe Brainard-esque poppies, head all empty without a care.

You can follow Bradley’s long white line all the way around the gallery: in the back room, the fragmented Hash Eater brings a blood-red scumble to rolling hills, while more dark irises and some coaches’ whistles drift by. Its neighbor Kalparush is undeniably cosmic, with evil-eye sigils diving in galactic pools of deep purple swirling about a night sky filled to the brink with stars. In its brightest quadrant, there’s what looks to be a portal to a completely different painting. Hung near the in-comparison spare Salute, a three-quarter portrait done up in red, white, black, and blue, it’s easy to see how the chronology here is one of entering—and like it or not, having to exit—the night. Vom Abend is German for “from the evening,” and like the works’ wandering line this title reaches out to lend us a temporal hand. From the evening we seem to start and, from the evening we arrive at our end.

These paintings are well within Bradley’s canon, but there’s an obvious accumulation of images, memories, and sensations that are beginning to comprise a dynamic new language beyond the abstraction/figuration binary. You can see the influence of the Fauvists and the Abstract Expressionists, but the work supersedes buttoned-up assessment: it’s a gas to walk around this huge room, looking at these massive, bright canvases. It’s not hard to admire their painterly craft and slow-art maneuvering. And it feels good to listen to the work tell the funny nowhere stories it can’t wait to share. Like an old friend offering up a fresh light in the doorway, there’s a sense of being in the right place at the right time: an ear-to-ear joy that follows you all the way home.