What may stay

It makes all the sense in the world that Brad has come to Oaxaca to make alebrijes. His curiosity not only led him to learn how to carve these fantastical figures, but also sparked an immediate interest in everything happening around him: the locus, the hills, and the stories of the people he met at and outside the “Casa Paraíso”. Everything Brad sees is observed with a keen eye, to be commented on later with a brief, very elegant phrase that captures both the situation and the person.

With the same speed with which he connected with his surroundings, he spread on his drafting table a whole array of the camp imagery that suffuses his work: “The Lone Ranger”, the anonymous calendar heartthrob, Barbie, the cartoon cowboy, children’s stories, the Land O’Lakes butter wrapper, an owl and coyotes in photos, illustrations, and cartoons.

During his residency at “Lagos Oaxaca”, Brad studied with the alebrije masters Pedro Mendoza Ortega and Marco Antonio López Guzmán, who taught him to carve a coyote with a mallet and chisel, to sand, and to paint the exquisite designs that cover and bring these sculptures to life.

Pedro very generously proposed that Brad break apart some small alebrijes made by the master, so that the student could reassemble and repaint them. In my mind, I saw Brad assembling the various animal forces within each sculpture, adding them as elements of joy and vitality to his collection of what he calls “future relics”.

This is the material with which he imagines assessing whether everything is chaos, or if there might be moments of solace in history. Are there glimmers of hope that could redeem humankind for its destructive passage through the planet?

In his work as a painter, Brad starts from dominant narratives and looks back at the theater of civilization, as if in post-apocalyptic times, taking retrospective stock of the vestiges of this world. Painting, collage, drawing, and a stylized Barbie can all transform from ideals into deformed, decrepit and hesitant characters, and then mutate perfectly into “the Barbie constellation”, one of 88 imaginary drawings in the sky. I’m sure he would have given some distinguishing characteristics to Ken’s girlfriend, if he hadn’t already done so with Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” in his painting “North Star #2”.

I imagine a short list of the characteristics of this “spark”, with which Brad might stake his claim (or not) on the world: beauty, justice, joy, animal strength, youth, eroticism, myth, the tradition of art, lots of humor, and the painter’s enthusiasm for turning these prompts into strokes and nuances.