Artist Profile: Bradley Chriss’ Complicated Apocalypses

by Lauren Rice

 

 

 

 

 

Bradley Chriss, For T.N., 2020, gouache on Paper, 17x28 inches, image courtesy of the artist

Last summer, I participated in Burnaway Magazine’s 2022 Arts Writing Incubator, Criticism as Care. In retrospect, I’m not really sure what compelled me to want to be incubated at that particular moment—I am certain that in previous years, I would have scrolled past the call for participants without a second thought. I think it was the year’s theme that struck me the most. I was already writing as Tools for Better Living on Instagram, and the ideas around the theme, Criticism as Care, fell in line with the weird and poetical way I was writing about contemporary art. Once accepted into the program, I was especially excited about the structure that it would give to my writing, in terms of a writing assignment with a set due date (I am a big fan of due dates, even self-inflicted ones). I have more to say about the experience overall, but perhaps will save that for a future blog post.

Over the course of the month-long program, I wrote an 800-word profile on an artist that I know and love, Bradley Chriss. Chriss will have a solo exhibition of work, Return of the Ash Eater, from May 1-29, 2023 at Unit.B in Baltimore, MD. You can find more about Bradley Chriss and his work on his website.

 

 

Bradley Chriss is not afraid of being complicated. Often combining figurative elements and abstract motifs like dots and dashes with a limited, primary-triadic color palette, the genre that best describes his recent gouache paintings on paper is landscape.  Chriss’ landscapes slip between representation and abstraction, creating unsettling experiences.  Solid ground is difficult to find in many of Chriss’ paintings. Instead, we surrender to the cloudy nebulae of chromatic washes, the sub-atomic overlay of tiny brushstrokes. Chriss’ topsy-turvy wonderlands are mysterious and magical, but also disturbing, absurd and tragic.

Autobiographical information is embedded within the formal attributes of his paintings.  Raised in Toledo, OH, he now observes the Blue Ridge Mountains daily from his home near Roanoke, VA.  Shifts in visibility of the mountains due to cloud cover or environmental factors serve as inspiration. The artist’s work is motivated by diverse themes such as the Anthropocene, ecological, social and political collapse, and the mixed emotions of hope and anxiety that arrived after the birth of his daughter.  Another motivator is a sincere desire to find physical and emotional healing. After relocating to Virginia, a concussion left Chriss briefly unable to work. He found therapy through acts of pleasure: by looking at and painting the natural world.

Chriss identifies the color red as a link to his Mexican heritage.  He proposes that art, like learning a language, is a way to reconnect to our missing cultural customs.  Color also serves as a connection between Chriss and his art historical ancestors.  When you look for primary triads historically, you’ll find them easily: from Fra Angelico to Frida Kahlo to Mondrian.  These artists share Chriss’ interest in exploring imagery of pain and healing, or color repetition as a method to find spiritual order after crisis.  Chriss credits ukiyo-e master Hiroshige for his compositional strategies and surrealist André Masson for his synthesis of imagery from the past with “modern problems”.  In contrast to the influence of the natural world, media and screens are also sources of inspiration for Chriss.  After all, the contemporary consumption of media is not a solitary activity; we watch and therefore consent to being watched. From pools of painted chroma, sentient, ethereal eyes observe us. His use of color is eye-popping, not just for the sake of fun color play, but because it must compete with the constant stream of content continually vying for our attention.

The artist happily eschews the symmetry currently en vogue with many contemporary painters working with landscape imagery. Instead, Chriss favors asymmetrical compositions and color choices that are eerily prescient of the images captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.  In the photographs and the paintings, stars dot across the heavens and the state of solid matter is in flux. Chriss’ paintings disorient spatially and compress temporally.  We are both before humanity’s dawn, and after its demise.  Chriss resists slickness in his paintings, too, opting instead for pours of paint, layered washes of Holbein gouache and urgent, repetitive dots and dabs to create galactic depth. That's not to say he lacks precision; his paintings are layered with exquisite details, deftly toeing the line between the grotesque and the beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bradley Chriss, California Ash Falling on the Blue Ridge, 2020, gouache on paper, 19x28 inches, image courtesy of the artist

From bird’s eye to bug’s eye compositional arrangements, Chriss positions us as beings within the land or the sky. The mountains are as charismatic and changeable as the cloud formations, whose contours evoke the shapes of brains or intestines. In Waning, a painting from 2018, the clouds themselves contain skulls and entrails converging in orgiastic delight, solid forms dissipating into gaseous particles.

Chriss’ paintings elicit tension between environmental harmony and collapse. Sensual, linear descriptions of human fingers sprout ecstatically upwards from the earth, in a mycorrhizal communion with the flowers and mushrooms. In the painting, Private Interests in the Sky, the intimate scale manages to capture a vastness reminiscent of a Thomas Cole painting. We find ourselves hovering above dark, rolling hills. The world is burning and the sky rains turbulent drops of red, yellow and blue hellfire; jokey subversions of sloppy AbEx drips. In another painting, California Particles in the Blue Ridge Sky, Chriss references the drift of ash across the country from 2020’s catastrophic western wildfires in a grim dance of stippled dots.

In Chriss’ painted worlds, all parts participate in a grander, inexplicable system. We like to forget that humans are part of nature, even if, as Chriss theorizes, we were brought forth by nature as a suicide agent. When looking at Chriss’ paintings, we see celebratory acts of play and pleasure, human frailty and fallibility, and the contradictory beauty and terror of the natural world. Ghostly entities and disembodied eyes gaze right back at us, tacit, inquisitive, imploring. While cynicism is detectable, I also find its opposite: hope.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bradley Chriss, Pressure, 2022, gouache on paper, 19x29 inches, image courtesy of the artist