Joe Bradley takes an unorthodox approach to abstraction while paying meticulous attention to the process of painting. The artist talks to Samuel Reilly about his exhibition, ‘Day World’, at Gagosian in London.
What ideas inform your solo exhibition, ‘Day World’?
Maybe five or six years ago, I decided that I didn’t want to rely on ideas. The works in this show are the product of just painting, of improvising, of showing up at the studio every day. Now, after the fact, I can look around and tease out reoccurring motifs and that sort of thing, but I don’t go in with an idea, or the ideas are so banal that they’re barely worth mentioning. Typically I’ll be thinking about formal things – maybe the paint should be a little thicker or thinner, or some sort of idea about scale, or palette.
There’s an epigraph to this show from Moby-Dick, describing ‘a large oil painting’ that is ‘in every way defaced’ but that also holds a ‘sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity’. Does that sound like a description of your paintings?
Well, I was at a friend’s studio recently – a painter. We were talking shop; he mentioned that when he approaches a painting, he needs to finish it in a day or two. If he didn’t, he would lose touch with the painting. My approach is really the opposite – I work on these things slowly, over a long period of time. And one of the things that has to happen is I have to feel a certain remove from the painting so I feel free to deface it, to ruin a perfectly good painting to try and get to the next page. Whether or not there’s any shot at the sublime – that isn’t for me to say.
That pull from Moby-Dick – I’ve been rereading it. I don’t remember it being so funny. It’s hysterical, every paragraph is so craggy, so loaded – the language is so dense. I thought that description of the painting was so funny, and I felt like it related in some way. Of course, I know it’s a silly and pretentious idea, to tap Melville…
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