Mark Bradford at Lombard-Freid

Art in America, Sept, 2004 by Sarah Valdez

A Los Angeles-based hairdresser and self-described "beauty operator" who also earned his MFA from Cal Arts, Mark Bradford garnered quick fame for his alluring collages on canvas of singed hair-permanent endpapers (the small rectangles of transparent paper used by hairstylists) that appeared in "Freestyle," the 2001 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem of up-and-coming African-American artists. He coated these works with allover washes of see-through pigment, some of which was hair dye, in such a way that light appeared to shine through vaguely uneven grids. At once restrained, elegant and intricate, the Zen-like visuals Bradford created with "low" materials instantly mesmerized the eye.

For "Tainted," his second New York exhibition, the end-paper-on-canvas strategy remained, but the lattices have grown less gridlike. In the new works, Bradford has also started using paint and gold leaf, as well as collaged text and images. The letters "uice," in bright red, for instance, sprawl diagonally across one large, dirty-looking canvas smudged with black paint. The piece encouraged visitors to imagine the complete word "juice" (as the piece is titled) and all its potential connotations: wet, sweet and powerful, among other possibilities. On top of the letters and taking up the rest of the pictorial plane, vertically oriented, milky white endpapers are layered in an elaborate dance of protrusion, recession, obfuscation and revelation.

In another canvas that reads as an homage to the sneaker as status symbol, The Hood Is Moody (2003), Bradford's endpapers rain down like confetti. Bits of gold leaf and small splashes of brightly hued paint add to the aura of festivity. Collaged-on images of three white, equivocally different high-top sneakers sit in profile at the base of the canvas, accompanied by their respective names: "slamaze," "swagger" and "bangonya." As previously, Bradford sandwiches his work between art and popular culture, between esthetic and everyday experience. He involves not only "real" endpapers from his "real" job, but appropriated images and words of the exact sort Clement Greenberg, uber champion of high abstract painting, would have doubtless deemed "kitsch"--not art.

Another mixed-medium work, Smokey (2003), however, suggests that Bradford's real talent may indeed lie in creating abstract compositions. This opus includes more grays than one may have imagined possible, and finds a frenzy of endpapers caught up in a precarious balancing act of shape and color. The piece conveys the sense of an urgent, fully focused formal sensibility at work.

--Sarah Valdez