THREE RECTANGLES of blue, yellow, and black underpin Joe Bradley’s Mother and Child, 2016. In the top left corner of the painting, a yellow crescent is crowned, or perhaps being eclipsed, by a great gray disc, and strokes of red shore up the circular forms. This might feel like familiar modernist territory. But look closer: Weirdness seeps in.
At the far left edge of the canvas, a violence of red and black strikes a patch of tan. In the center, a single red stroke obscures a second yellow crescent. Blurts of green intrude into the blue, as does a substratum of yellow, which lurks in the blue and black areas. Step back from the work, let its design dissipate and the blue field recede: The doubled discs become heads, or perhaps wheels, and that brushy black space opens up like a stage, containing so many tones, strokes, scrapes, and flourishes that it seems to await an actor’s entrance. If it is a narrative space, Bradley withholds obvious clues, diverting our attention with a title that refers to an obvious but nevertheless still powerful visual motif, just as he does with the tidily effective composition.
A recent show at Gagosian Gallery in New York titled “Krasdale” highlighted Bradley’s particular way of suspending fixed meaning in his artwork. He is at once earnestly engaged with the narratives of emotive meaning and autobiography and also aware of the humor and absurdity of seeking and depicting those modes via painting. Balancing these two states of mind, Bradley creates a narrative arc across media that has, as its backbone, a particular kind of cartoon drawing. Cartoon not so much in the Pop or comic sense, but rather in its definition as an efficient, open-ended, shorthand mode of drawing, and as the scaffolding for representation in any media. Bradley’s cartoon line veers into abstraction and out the other side, unscathed. Narrative always seems on the verge of coalescing, or perhaps on the verge of breaking down.