Keep on Trucking

Executed in 2009, Keep on Trucking is one of Joe Bradley’s powerful yet playful Shmagoo paintings. A gigantic pictogram-like sketch made with oil sticks on canvas, Keep on Trucking conveys universal symbols such as a mouth, arrow and the discernible stick-man. Oscillating between figuration and abstraction these motifs are reminiscent, and yet utterly distinct, from his earlier modular paintings; monochromatic rectangles arranged into totemic and crude figures, that he referred to as his modular paintings. At the time, Bradley had a parallel studio activity of drawing that allowed him to break free from the prescribed constraints of the modular paintings. ‘Those pieces are more free’ he said (J. Bradley, quoted in L. Hoptman, ‘Joe Bradley’, Interview Magazine, 29 March 2013). Their reduced visual idiom followed the modernist impulse towards a primitive art which he views as ‘a template for everything that comes after, including the screens that we are staring into’ (J. Bradley, quoted in L. Hoptman, ‘Joe Bradley’, Interview Magazine, 29 March 2013). Thus his work is engaging in a dialogue with the history of art, ‘With painting’ he says ‘I always get the impression that you’re sort of entering into a shared space. There’s everyone who’s painted in the past, and everyone who is painting in the present’ (J. Bradley, quoted in L. Hoptman, ‘Joe Bradley’, Interview Magazine, 29 March 2013). He was drawn to the word Shmagoo for its primal connotations ‘The word stuck with me, and I began to think of Shmagoo 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’ (J. Bradley, quoted in https://www.presenhuber.com/en/exhibitions/2012/Bradley_2012_4.html, [accessed 28 May 2014]).