Crack Between the Floorboards

This work was inspired in part by Gustave Caillebotte’s 1875 painting Les raboteurs de parquet (The Floor Planers), now in the Musée d’Orsay, in which three shirtless laborers are seen from above stripping varnish from a bourgeois apartment’s floorboards. As an early depiction of the urban working class and the eroticized male nude, rendered so the picture plane tilts up toward the viewer, Les raboteurs de parquet shocked the art establishment. Bradford translates these themes into an abstract, kaleidoscopic work that alludes to contemporary issues of class, location, and space. Using advertising posters and other material gathered from abandoned buildings and empty lots in his South Central Los Angeles neighborhood, Bradford collaged papers atop gridlines of paste, string, and tape then gouged and sanded the surface of the picture to reveal passages of bright color.

Credit: Purchase, Aleksandar Pesko Gift, 2016