The slippery chaos of Joe Bradley

There’s something about Joe Bradley that resists tidy narratives. Maybe it’s the way he’s been slipping in and out of painterly identities for two decades now – minimalist monk one year, greasy cartoon nihilist the next. Or maybe it’s just that he doesn’t seem too interested in telling you what anything “means.” So it’s a bit of a surprise (but not really) that his new show, ‘Animal Family’ at David Zwirner, London, feels like both a departure and a homecoming.

The title alone hints at something primal, tender, and possibly feral. The work? A tangled menagerie of gesture, figuration, and psychic residue – equal parts prehistoric cave wall and Lower East Side bodega mural. Bradley, long allergic to sentiment, is suddenly circling something like intimacy. Not that he’d put it that way.

Walking through David Zwirner waiting for the artist to arrive, ‘Animal Family’ feels less a contemplative gallery stroll than a peripheral vision experience: things emerge, weird and half-seen, like an animal darting through the brush. These canvases don’t wink, they bare their teeth. Gone are the modular monochromes and their clean postmodern sarcasm. What we get instead is something rawer, loopier, more alive – the exorcised ghosts of children’s books and underground comics.

Brightly coloured primal forms emerge and dissolve, interspersed with recognisable details – a leg, snout or tail provide momentary footholds, but everything is slippery here, constantly oscillating between chaos and cohesion. Bradley is a stylistic shapeshifter, who typically rejects the fine-tuning of old ideas in pursuit of bold new ones and with ‘Animal Family’, he has broken new ground yet again.

“I tend to work on a group of paintings all at once,” says Bradley. “I like the idea that if the paintings arrive together, they can speak to one another. But when I turn the studio lights on in the morning and encounter 15 half-baked paintings, it can be quite overwhelming.”

Unlike previous exhibitions where Bradley (who was born in 1975 in Kittery, Maine and is now based in New York) produced works quickly and individually, here he has reared this group of paintings as one. He didn’t crank these out, he lived with them – among them. Working slowly, and on several paintings at once, the energy shifts. Instead of quick-hit punchlines, we get paintings that brood, loop back, double down. Forms recur, mutate. A line that started in Parade echoes, distorted, in Janus. It’s less like storytelling, more like raising a group of weird siblings. They don’t match, but they belong together.

Evidence of this slower pace is viscerally imprinted onto the surface of each canvas, with layers added, scraped off, reconsidered. Thick, muscular swathes of oil paint mix with more spasmodic, gestural strokes, while gouges, grazes and other defacements – made long after the paint has dried – expose a hidden stratigraphy. “There’s a texture and surface quality that I’m shooting for that I can really only arrive at over time,” he explains.

“It’s not something that could happen in an afternoon. There’s something about letting the signal go cold which is important to me, it’s exciting to go into a painting and respond to a decision that I made six months earlier. When I lose touch with a painting, it no longer feels so precious, so I can go in and really attack it.”

A far cry from his brutally reduced Schmagoo paintings – the ‘one shot’ series of glyphs that initiated Bradley’s swift international ascent when they were first shown in 2008 – these works represent a significant change in rhythm. “I find this approach more gratifying,” says Bradley. “I enjoy having a sustained relationship with a painting over a long period of time. By the time it makes its way out into the world, it’s really gone through something. It’s not a spontaneous expression.”

Visually, the chasm between those spartan monochromes, produced nearly two decades ago, and these new paintings, with their competing crayon-box of colours and narrative detail, feels vast at first. But there is something in their shared primal forms and unruly shamanic iconography that binds them conceptually, a reflection perhaps of Bradley’s enduring interest in the exuberance of comics, purity of line and timeless graphic clarity of signs and symbols. “I started buying books on Lascaux caves,” says Bradley. “The drawings in those caves, the bulls and horses, these motifs go back to the very beginning of painting.”

Continuing towards figuration and the bold palette that he previously exhibited in Vom Abend, his debut show with David Zwirner in New York last year, these new paintings reflect a similar chromatic assertiveness. Using the paint directly from the tube and only occasionally mixing them on the canvas, Bradley admits, “I’m not going for subtlety and nuance when it comes to palette. I want it to have this graphic quality to it, so I think of it almost like reaching for a crayon.”

In paintings like Good World and Bull, Bradley’s biomorphic amalgams are set against a nighttime canopy of stars, or blossoming green pastures under fresh blue skies – “a kind of pastoral cosmic ambience,” he says with a laugh. Beyond their compositional allusions to landscape, the use of earthy tones and raw impasto recall the physicality of rugged terrain. “Bob Thompson’s work was very present in my thinking,” explains Bradley. “He was an African American painter working in New York during the 1960s and he made these very vivid, psychedelic landscape paintings with figures – he was a big reference point for sure.”

Upstairs in the gallery, Bradley leans into figuration more heavily still with a series of vertical canvases. Totemic and monumental, they recall the deconstructed mid-century figuration of Jean Dubuffet or Pablo Picasso. “It was actually inspired by a group of paintings de Kooning made on doors in the 1970s,” admits Bradley. “They were of women, not the iconic women of his, but these later sloppy women he painted out in Long Island. I had never made a tall skinny painting, so I thought it might be interesting to give it a try.”

Fittingly, Janus was the first painting of the series, a disturbingly psychosexual rendition of the two-faced Roman God associated with beginnings and endings. Surprisingly rendered as a nude blonde female, her blue and pink body delineated by Debuffet-style thick black outlines, Janus stands against a blue sky and a meadow of daisies. Yet this idyllic scene is simultaneously unnerving.

The figure, its head rendered in dual profiles, hovers between forward and backward, playful and solemn, cartoon and archetype. “When a painting works,” explains Bradley, “It’s not like ‘hurray’, it’s more like a reckoning. [Janus] felt kind of ugly and garish and there was something upsetting about it. I thought she needed company, so I painted a whole group.”

Shown alongside are a series of works on paper; simple yet virtuosic black line drawings, overtly figurative, often erotic, sometimes funny. Bradley describes drawing as “a free space” that typically “leads the way” for his paintings and ‘Animal Family’ is no exception, with each drawing offering a condensed shorthand for forms and shapes that repeat on canvas. “I began drawing animals and isolated figures – that pointed the way and granted permission to move that into painting,” he says. “Drawing is so casual and easy, whereas there’s a formality to painting. It’s much more involved. Sometimes something works on paper and it just falls flat on canvas.”

Drawing hasn’t always dovetailed so seamlessly with painting for Bradley, and with a mid-career survey at Vienna’s Kunsthalle Krems on the horizon, he’s had time to reflect on the evolution of his style over the last 15 years. As an artist, Bradley is seeking to “continuously pull the rug out from under myself,” and ‘Animal Family’ feels like the beginning of something new. “There are new dance moves in this group,” says Bradley. “I’ve been looking back and recognising certain patterns in my work – there seems to be a shift roughly every five years. This feels like it could be a catalyst for the next five.”