Ry David Bradley: The Gen Turn

At a moment when new technologies are becoming more advanced and more readily available than ever, Ry David Bradley has returned to painting. But he hasn't turned away from technology—the possibilities are too exciting to leave entirely to non-artists.

By Cameron Hurst

Few artists can claim such sustained engagement with the entwined possibilities of painting and new technology as Ry David Bradley. In GEN, Bradley’s 2023 solo show with Sullivan+Strumpf, the artist returns to his home country of Australia (after completing an MFA at the Victorian College of the Arts, he spent time in New York and London, and now lives in Paris). He also returns to painting. This exhibition is the first time Bradley has worked directly with paint in seven years.

GEN occurs at a radical juncture in terms of the possibilities of AI technologies. Bradley emerged alongside an international generation of ‘post-internet’ artists. Jon Rafman, Amalia Ulman, Simon Denny, Emma Stern, Sun Woo and Olli Epp are among a web of relevant contemporaries—all are, speaking broadly, interested in the social, political and aesthetic relationships between digital and physical image production. They warp, distort and iterate found images, memes and Photoshopped assemblages to explore the nature of networked life. All reveal the impossibility of drawing a sharp line between online and real experience. For these artists, using the internet is like mixing paints.

Ry David Bradley Aspect Codex, (render) 2023 Acrylic Flashe and Inkjet on Linen 150 x 160 cm

Now, we are well and truly post-internet. The networked connections that made the internet so ground-breaking have become prosaic. Who could get excited about the possibilities suggested by, for example, video-calling someone on the other side of the world? It is worth noting that throughout the first two decades of the 21st century, conservative art institutions were sceptical of the legitimacy of artists making work about the internet using digital tools. This is no longer true. The digital is central to today’s art world vernacular. Now, when we talk about the post-internet, we sort of know what to expect.

AI, on the other hand, is a different story—one that is terrifying or exciting (or some combination of both), depending on who you ask. Whatever you think, AI is here to stay. In a 2023 interview with the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the AI researcher Kate Crawford theorised that we are at the ‘generative turn.’ This generative turn is a pivot point: “a moment where what we previously understood about everything—from illustration to film directing to publishing—is all about to change very rapidly.” Artists are in a period of new, intense experimentation. Deep learning models such as Open AI’s DALL-E and ChatGPT can generate image or text outputs within seconds based on prompts, drawing on hundreds of thousands of data points. Input “woman with crimson hair looking at gold-glazed contemporary ceramic artwork in a spacious, white-walled gallery” into DALL-E, the AI will spit out uncanny iterations on the theme. These programs became widely available in 2022. They will only increase in speed and sophistication.

Perhaps now is the point that we will look back to as the start of ‘post-AI’ art. GEN is a crucial moment of artistic investigation.

AI has this kind of weird understanding for a beauty that feels slightly unnerving, and hence potent. Just a few years ago, it was terrible,” Bradley says. “But then we crossed a threshold. What lies on the other side?

This is still a new set of tools. People are responding to the possibilities of generated material differently. But any serious artist working with AI today will tell you that the initial prompts are just one small part of the creative process. First, a kind of textual massaging is required to produce a desired output. For GEN, Bradley began by creating a set of eerie scenes set in otherworldly, liminal places. While AI and new technology might often be considered in the realm of rationality and science, there is an unknowability at the heart of the machinations of the neural networks. It is not incidental that DALL-E, OpenAI’s image generator, is named partly after Salvador Dali. Dali, a leader of the dream-obsessed Surrealist movement, used to stir paint in a bowl for hours in order to lull himself into a trance-like, associative state that he believed created (or generated) his best ideas. Fittingly, AI images often have a dream-like unreality.

Ry David Bradley in his studio, 2023

Once Bradley generates his ethereal scenes, he manipulates the images using digital processes—diffusing light, altering textures, refining compositions. He then works with a specialist printer to transfer the images onto Parisian linen using a wide-format machine. The result is a matte surface with a flat, paint-like quality. Then, Bradley starts painting by hand. To add another metatechnological reference, Bradley’s acrylic strokes are attempts to replicate the pattern stamp textures of his software brushes (which themselves attempt to replicate the blurred effects of real paint on canvas.)

The presence of grey in Bradley’s work rewards attention. There is a twenty-first century technological sensibility to it. Neutral grey is the default colour of a Photoshop background. It is also the colour of sleekly minimal Apple products, some of the most desirable and influential objects of our epoch. A metallic coolness is discernible in the works in GEN. Bradley says that one reason he chooses to work in grayscale is because of the optical illusion created by layering the same tones in different materials. And it’s true—viewing the work, there is a moment of misrecognition. What is paint and what is print? What is real and what is a glowing, AI-generated mirage?

At a moment when new technologies become more advanced and more readily available than ever, Bradley returns to painting. But he doesn’t turn away from technology. The possibilities are too exciting to leave entirely to non-artists. So, he moves between worlds. Between neural networks and the human hand. Software and wet paint. Ry David Bradley is generating. This is what painting of the future looks like.