Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Printing Painter’s Journal with Elizabeth Jaeger at Linco Printing, Long Island City

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present new works by New York-based artist Joe Bradley under the title «Pigpen».

Bradley works in series, an approach that allows him to pursue ideas in painting and then drop them once they cease to interest him. In this way, the artist creates groups of works that over the years, offers a surprising diversity, but always retaining an unmistakable familiarity.

At the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Bradley received attention for a series of monochrome canvases arranged into figurations. Although primarily minimalist experiments à la Ellsworth Kelly, on closer inspection they resolved into crude figures, as their reduced aesthetic evoke association with computer games and primitive totem sculptures. Thanks to these arrangements, and their subtle, narrative titles, the monochrome surfaces, mostly painted on simple, pre-produced canvases, acquired a meaning of their own, addressing 20th-century developments in art theory and taking a playful look at the many and varied artistic experiments on the cusp of abstraction and figuration.

To anyone expecting an artist’s oeuvre to develop continually and predictably, the series that followed appears as a spectacular break or turning point—in these «Schmagoo Paintings», the colors vanish. They are gigantic pictogram-like scribbles made with grease pencil on white canvas, oscillating between figuration and abstraction in a way reminiscent of, but entirely different to, the «multi-panel paintings». These minimalist works dramatize universal codes and symbols (a mouth, Superman’s S logo, an arrow). Like children’s drawings, their reduced visual idiom follows the modernist impulse towards a «primitive art» but with an ironic nod to cartoons, which play a key role in Bradley’s work. (Cartoonist Chas Addams (1912–1988) has been an important source of inspiration since Bradley’s youth.) The «Schmagoo Paintings» (schmagoo is slang for heroin) are also a humorous search for the archetypal: «The word stuck with me, and I began to think of «Schmagoo» as shorthand for some sort of Cosmic Substance… Primordial Muck. The stuff that gave birth to everything […] I have been thinking of Painting as a metaphor for the original creative act.» (JB, 2008)

In another series begun recently, he makes large screen prints showing silhouettes of people in the poses of Egyptian figures. Another ongoing series featured in the artist’s first solo show at Galerie Eva Presenhuber comprises large-format paintings on unprimed canvases using an artistic vocabulary recalling Guston, Basquiat, and Paleolithic cave paintings. The canvases, mostly painted flat on the floor with a range of instruments, bear the traces of the (performative) processes leading to their creation. The special character of the paintings conserves the physical act of painting, and its style situated somewhere between abstract expressionism and naïve imagery, evokes a broad range of associations.

henning bohl @ casey kaplan NYC

HENNING BOHL
NAMENLOSES GRAUEN
EXHIBITION DATES: MARCH 29 – APRIL 28, 2012 OPENING: THURSDAY, MARCH 29, 6:00 – 8:00PM

For the last few months these pictures have been my monsters of the week. They form the consequences of the decisions I have taken and these consequences have an afterlife of consequences, which I have had to face. So, I accepted the fate that these fictions of mine have become truth - and more - actual materializations; that I have, from the depth of my windowless studio, unleashed another artwork upon a world already crowded with others.

These pictures are not about painting. They are also not about being monochrome, despite the fact that some of them are monochrome paintings. The ones that are painted, I painted as my own assistant for economical reasons but also out of interest. You can, if you have the taste for it, look out for an artist “touch” but it was merely a paint job: I p..painted those p..pictures because there was no other way. These pictures are about the reasons why they are what they are. The moment I decided to consider those reasons, they consumed the entire process and formed a net of logical steps and necessities that created a path, which I followed.

And this path has led me here:

If one really has to lay out the reasons in front of the audience, it would usually go like this: to apply certain strategies of conceptualization to your object, enhance the cultural capital of your source, connect it with what you have done and thus create meaning - and value.

For example: I found a box of tape dispensers in the shape of doughnuts over a year ago in Japan and for me they do form a perfectly created mass-produced fiction. It’s obvious that this form is ideal for its function, as it is able to fully encapsulate the roll of tape, and in doing so keep it clean from dust. But to further admit (the people from Scotch Tape Lab admitted…) that the product looks like a doughnut, and to then match the color of the product with the colors of the different flavors you might find in the icings of a real doughnut shop, is what made this surreal fiction become a rare reality for me.

As I have said, reasons come in like doughnuts and they lead the way. Once the doughnuts took place on the pictures, there needed to be a carpet to connect the paintings to a space and this space couldn’t be the gallery as it was. It had to have a layer of “icing” on the floor, just as the canvases had to have a layer of “icing”, which is the paint. The paint references the color scheme of the tape dispensers that surround them, which refers to the color and flavor of the icing on the doughnuts. So the carpet had to have the color of one of the paintings, and there were only so many colors to choose from.

The same is true for the fabric that depicts a model of the universe that is, rightly so, without center. Weirdly enough, it replaces our common understanding of outer space as an endless expansion of different parts with a map of endlessly expanding, repeating numbers of the same limited parts. This draws a parallel to the possibilities and limitations of cultural expression we find these days. This fabric, if divided into square partitions, shows four times the planet Earth. And in focusing on this part by cutting a square around these planets into the square partition of the possibly endless roll of fabric, we get an outtake that organizes its main subjects along diagonal crossing lines towards the outer frame instead of pointing to its center. In following this already given direction, it was only logical to emphasize this movement and add to it by using objects that orbit around that empty center on the outer side of thestretcher - to build a virtual frame around that frame. (In a similar but reversed logic the square monochrome pictures point to an empty center and carry their raison d ́etre towards the outside.)

Today, similar reasons that legitimize art are often to be found, whether it is: the size of a Manet in relation to the size of a monochrome painting, the insight that two complimentary colors on two paintings would mix into the grey tones you usually give to your other pictures (to stay in the discourse of younger monochromatic paintings), or the reasons one might have to reproduce the sandaled foot of the Statue of Liberty, or any of the many other reasons that can always be found to drive a little bit further down the road.
Older monochromes, as I maybe tend to misunderstand them, seem to me an attempt to deny all of this. An attempt to deny all of these relational, referential and legitimizing aspects. Or better yet, they build a negative dialectical approach next to it. In my fantasy, they resemble very much the impossible task that a writer of cosmic horror fiction faces - to describe entities that have no structural, organic or functional resemblance to anything from our world yet have to carry out the means of their own intentions (that is to hail and kill). In an attempt to focus exactly on the limitations of the imagination, the best of the writers and painters of these genres create a hill of denial that offers a precise perspective upon the valley of the limitations of human existence, first of all the limitations of gravity.

Henning Bohl, Zürich, March 2012