Christopher Braddock’s prints

Press, 1 June 1988, Page 30

Christopher Braddock’s prints

review

“Monoprints and Drawings,” by Christopher Braddock, at the Gingko Gallery, until June 16. Reviewed by Pat Unger. Christopher Braddock’s prints and drawings are refreshingly austere in an ascetic sort of way. The hero of his work is the brush-stroke, its anonymous but intense personal life as expressed through the monoprint technique. These brush marks are not the emblematic paint marks of Roy Lichtenstein, with their send-up of newsprints ever-popu-lar, mechanical culture. Braddock’s marks are an expression of paint’s texture, its plasticity and the receptivity of the ground on to which it is transferred. After Braddock manipulates his medium on to stone and then monoprints off his image, he tears it

up, to reassemble the print-paper in new and varied compositions. This gives further glimpses into the intimate life of

light/dark, of paint-scrap-ing scratches, of paint solidity, of paper edge and of smudges. The finished works vary between bold, black and white abstract constructs to more dense arrangements that have an elusive look of something almost representational, something that has been sewn together (and helped by a couple of pins) but whatever it is, it?s a-private matter

In some of the works, tonalities are set free in a dynamic space, in others they become indulgent to the point of heaviness. Occasionally, Braddock’s sense of adventure and his discovery of the endless possibilities of starkness are a little on the esoteric side. Loose, elegant, bal-

anced or off-beat, these works impress for their control of medium, their sense of sculptural mass in space and their overriding concern for the internal dynamics of the work itself, with no reference to any external matters. They are tonal essays that say a lot about the purity of visual research.