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
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