Some art exhibitions remain with one, slowly seeping into one’s consciousness, subtly fostering new ways of thinking about the art that are not immediately apparent at the time of viewing the work.  One such exhibition was of Mark Bradford’s work, Masses and Movements, which opened the new Hauser & Wirth Museum on Isla del Rey, in the wonderfully protective harbour of Mahón, Menorca.

Ironically this show closed yesterday, but no matter.  By the time I went to see it in mid-October, some 48,000+ people had been to see it, eloquent at a time of lingering pandemic restrictions on a small, beautiful Spanish island.  Alas, all catalogues and books had sold out about the exhibition, and scarce information was available there about the body of work.  Yet in some ways, that did not matter in the slightest because it left the work to speak for itself for each viewer.

The impact was powerful.  Bradford’s work, with which I was not familiar, has that wonderful capacity to be extremely compelling when viewed at distance, whilst drawing one in – almost nose to painting - with exquisite, delicate portions of each canvas that speak eloquently of societal issues of our times. It was somewhat overwhelming, and I left feeling as if I had not encompassed all that there was to see, savour and understand.  Complexity and urgency, movement, an impression of vastness, a wonderful sense of colour – they all kalidescoped.

Even glimpsing Bradford’s unusual creative methods was dizzying: his large stretched canvases sometimes sagged with the weight of collaged paper and paint that he applied.  Apparently his paints come from Home Depot – what an advertisement for that vast building supplier! He collages multiple layers of paper onto the canvas – plain, printed, illustrations, photographs, anything – using clear shellac to fix each layer.  In some of the canvases, there were also embedded pieces of string or lines of caulking to emphasize lineal elements. After that preparation, it is apparently on to power sanders and other tools, as he excavates like an archaeologist, unearthing vignettes of colour, felicitous juxtapositions of images, deeper layers. The palimpsests are everywhere, a delight of treasure hunting for the viewer.

The results are frequently most beautiful.  Subtle, powerful in their allusions to human angst and conundrums, often hard-hitting in their social commentary but always done very discreetly and in such elegance that you can remain captivated by the visual beauty and not really dwell on the other messages. But I was reminded that Bradford did grow up in Los Angeles in the 1960s onwards, an African American – thus in a maelstrom of American social changes and battles.

Somehow, strangely, Bradford’s paintings made me think of quotes I recently read by Maria Popova about a book published early last century, Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know by Edwin Tinney Brewster.  The book’s author was writing about how children should apprehend the world for what it really is, its natural processes and how things worked. (As an aside, apparently, Alan Turing, father of modern computing, was so captivated by this book that it led him to devote a lot of thought and drawings to the biology of life and how organisms take shape.) Brewster described “aliveness” and the parallels between trees and humans:  “But at least half of every living tree is already dead; while the larger and longer lived a tree is, the smaller proportion of it is alive at one time ... Our hair and nails are not alive at all, and that our outer skin, the thin skin, that is, which we tear off when we bark our shins, is fully alive only on the inside. Our “bark” in fact, is very like a tree’s.”

Those layers and layers of collage and paint, that Bradford exposes, excavates, refines, emphasizes, seem to me to hint at the same “aliveness” about which Brewster talks in nature. Between the canvas surface, initially hugely visible and powerfully stated, and the revealed intimate passages of colour, image and delicacy, hover these same zones of different states of functioning, urgent life in its myriad forms. His work pulses with energy, at different speeds and in varying forms, rather like the veins and arteries coursing through living entities.

No wonder Mark Bradford is as acclaimed as he is, both for his creativity but also for his social engagement and outreach to sectors of society not often involved in the art world.  His work allows us all to ponder our zones of “aliveness” and connections to the world around us.