Since the mid-1960s, when he first began painting abstractly, Peter Bradley has treated color as a portal—an aperture onto another realm or a threshold to the sensorial. Made six decades later, the paintings in Burning On extend his pursuit of the ineffable while responding to the hues and vicissitudes of his surroundings. Pouring acrylic directly onto canvases laid flat on the ground, Bradley lets his compositions evolve organically. His forms are at turns liquid, translucent, and eddying, and at others crystallize into topographies. This suite of paintings extends his distinct visual language into vivid new terrain. 

To create his first major body of work, Bradley used a spray gun to project acrylic onto canvas. Initially made in pursuit of efficiency, this early choice to forgo a paintbrush was pivotal. It liberated him, in his words, from “the tremendous indulgence to create something to which I already knew the answer.” Over the ensuing decades, Bradley has continued to invite chance—via painting implements with “a mind of [their] own” like the spray gun, or a drill for mixing—into his process. Rather than closed and systems-based, like many of his peers making aleatory work, his improvisational approach remains open to the world around him. 

The forces of nature are key collaborators. This includes Bradley’s garden, which he began cultivating after moving upstate from Manhattan in 1997. “Different times in the year I get more inspired with color, changing color of leaves, what ice does,” explains Bradley. This spring’s unprecedented abundance of irises infused his palette with velvety purples and indigos—nocturnal flashes in daylight. At times he literally integrates elements of his surroundings, embedding found objects like insect wings and flower petals in his molten paint. Recently, the artist has begun responding to the configurations left by dappled sun on his canvases, echoing their shifting abstractions in his forms; yellow effloresces in Your Embrace chart light breaking through shadow. Still seeking novel approaches to manipulating paint, Bradley at times uses a bamboo cane from his garden’s grove to alter his surfaces.

His sonic environment—recently, live recordings of Miles Davis, Eric Clapton, and Duane Allman—also permeates. Like Wassily Kandinsky, Bradley experiences sound as color; his paintings mediate between the aural and the visual. Its ground composed of billowing fields of acrylic diluted to the consistency of watercolor, Coltrane’s Nebula crescendoes in a churning, textured swath on the top-right of the canvas. The distinct registers—one thickly clustered, the other gauzy—coalesce as polyphony. 

While responding to his milieu, Bradley nonetheless channels the cosmic, linking the everyday with the astral and its counterpart in myth and enigma, the aquatic. In Montipora and Groove Brain, both titled after corals, fluid gestures allow the viewer to trace the movement of specks of paint as they dissolve and flow, as if suspended in the current. The tonal range in Callisto, at turns marbled and mottled, evokes a lunar surface—the moon landing broadcast in technicolor—while the phosphorescent plumes rising in Borealis establish the canvas as a window onto the heavens. With Midnight Blues, the artist approaches a new minimalism: playing with the dilution of a single inky acrylic, he wrests countless tones from the same source. Color, as ever, bridges the material and otherworldly realms.