Mark Bradford at Finesilver - San Antonio

Mark Bradford's exhibition, "That Wasn't My Car You Saw," included five large paintings and a relieflike grid of 265 units of layered and burnt permanent-wave end papers spaced a few inches apart on the wall. With their crispy black edges, the little translucent rectangles comprising this untitled piece (all works 2002) resemble singed bits of onion. The primary motif of the paintings is also the accumulation of burnt-edged end papers that, when individually glued on the surfaces of the 6-by-7-foot canvases, practically disappear, leaving only the dark contours of the rectangular papers visible. Including painted patchworks of color and other collaged materials, such as silver paper and billboard scraps, the gridded compositions are essentially geometric, yet decidedly improvisational and playful. Much like drawings, Bradford's paintings have a graphic quality that results from the emphatic edges of the translucent end papers, and is enhanced by, in some instances, the use of a small ink stamp of a bird sitting on a wire and a proliferation of sharp-edged rectangles drawn with a black marker. With a jazzy energy reminiscent of Mondrian's last paintings or Tobey's "white writing," the multitudes of overlapped rectangles provide an analogous sense of urban dynamism, a reasonable theme for this Los Angeles artist who works as a hairdresser in South Central.

The most striking recent development in Bradford's work is the use of bold color. His earlier paintings, consisting primarily of end papers and hair dye on canvas, are softer, more neutral in color and shallower in illusionistic depth. The new paintings sing loudly, yet not at all off-key. In Nasty Ass Pigeons, a milky lime-green background, interrupted by patches of silver, surrounds a central gray area where the end papers are most densely layered and clustered. Their deployment dissipates slightly at the canvas's edges and top, creating a landscapelike space. Horizontal rows of bird stamps (the pigeons in the work's title) and sporadic appearances of a stamped impression of a fuzzy blue oblong punctuate the meandering grid of burnt-edged rectangles. I Thought You Knew has a similar, allover composition that is somehow stronger than those of the other, more tastefully designed paintings, all of which feature a thick cluster of end papers decoratively juxtaposed against a painterly background. Accented by a few scraps of yellow posters with portions of black block letters, I Thought You Knew is mostly silver, both matte and shiny, with foil, paper and paint. Materially dense and slightly tattered, it is nevertheless buoyant and ethereal in tone, evoking the joy of city life along with the beautician's commitment to beauty.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group