SVD Voices: Ian Soler Bradley

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Hey, I’m Ian Soler Bradley, I am 23 years old, and I live and work in La Floresta, Barcelona. I currently work as an assistant in a school, and I am finishing my studies in Philosophy. I like spending most of my time working in my studio.

What does music represent in your painting?

Music is a fundamental element for my painting, it is strongly linked to it in many ways and establishes a huge reciprocity and dependence with it. You could say it is an almost symbiotic relationship. Proof of this was the installation of the last exhibition with my collaborator Elías Fabré (Ellian) in Aula 46 Art Gallery, where music and painting, sound and image, worked together to create a sensitive, holistic experience.

Music, understood as an arrangement of sounds ordered in a certain way, leads me to be interested in the very concept of sound. For some time now, my interest has been directed towards something more related to sound and the parallelism that can be established between sound and the basic elements of drawing and painting: the point, the line, the color scheme, space…

It’s the combination of these elements or parameters that configure the compositions, transforming them into something rhythmic. Rhythm is also a fundamental element in a plastic composition; a dialogue is created between one or more pieces of an ensemble and space. The synergy that can be generated by pieces arranged in the right way in a space can have a lot to do with musical rhythm and, as in painting, not only in the quality of the individual piece, but also in its arrangement on an album, in a session, a live performance, and so on.

If I remember correctly, Derrick May (one of the fathers of electronic disco music) said he found the repetitive sound of the machines in the factories where he worked (Detroit) much more interesting than the complex jazz music he inherited from his parents. Something similar happens to me with painting: I am often more interested in simple, everyday elements than in the compositions of the great masters, without minimizing their importance. Elements such as peeling walls, half-erased street signs, walls with uneven layers of paint, floors with appealing patterns, pebbles, reflections of paint on cars, unfinished artworks, advertising panels that generate interesting collages, as well as many other things.

Apart from this relationship, which perhaps has more to do with sound abstraction and its similarity to my visual or plastic research, there are links between these media that are more obvious and do not require such conceptualization. For example, a key aspect is that I usually work with music and this has to be clearly represented in my work. Another equally important aspect, or perhaps more so, is that my father—the person who opened the world of sensitivity and appreciation to me—was a good pianist and music theorist.

From an early age I received a great deal of information, references, and guidelines that I struggled with endlessly, but eventually grew up with. Bach was an institution at home, it was compulsory to listen to him, as well as the great free jazz musicians revered in our environment, like Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman… I spent part of the early years of my life in a bar run by my father called Be-Bop, where wonderful jam sessions were held, and after a certain hour the dishes would start flying and crashing everywhere. 

Musically, however, my father was never a nostalgic or closed-minded person. On the contrary, he was completely in favor of the evolution of sound to new frontiers, hence his involvement and interest in electroacoustic music and the search for abstract sound. I have to thank him for that drive and thirst for research that he was able to convey to me. Indeed, the texts and compositions of Stockhausen, Xenakis, Ligetti, Boulez, Cage etc., that talked about sound, were the most influential for me. Likewise, I can relate best with people who work with sound: my friend Ignasi (Kip Clerk), my father, Elías…

Where do Fiambre and Jamón Jamón come from?

A “Fiambre” (literally “cold cuts” or “corpse” in Spanish) is a trace that results from a movement, like the footprint left by a walker, whose passage is temporarily recorded on the ground.

Something similar happens with painting, where the end result is something like a crime scene in which a series of events (strokes, erasures, corrections and so on) took place, but the only evidence is the elements that remained on the canvas, which is the corpse, the trace. A flower that has just been plucked to observe its beauty and possess it is at the height of its splendor, but from then on it will tend to wither until it disappears. It is beauty in its moment of pre-decay. This is Fiambre.

On your IG, we saw some posts about the inspiration behind a work. Does it come from the tangible and the palpable, or rather from a concept in your mind?

It's a mix, there are immediate impressions and other reflections that leave snippets of information, like a stone that is slowly being polished. Either by the alteration caused by my actions or by the ripening and/or action of time. Then there are some themes of great importance in my work, such as music, clubbing, dancing, Barça, forest, repetition, gesture, love, sex… These are themes that I like to analyze and reflect on. I like spending many hours in my studio. I only work outside to paint the landscape, also a fundamental element of my painting, since it helps me study light and colors.

It is difficult for me to work at an artist residence, to start from scratch in a workspace I am not familiar with. I prefer to stay in my studio, surrounded by my pieces and my own color. In this sense, my work seeks to feed very much on itself: I analyze the works in my studio and create variations or combinations of ideas and simple moments. As if I were sampling my work, rearranging it, taking elements from it… You could say that my work tries to be very endogamous, I suppose that's why the paintings are always uglier and stupider. 

I am not a big consumer of painting or art, I try to see what interests me or the work of my peers. However, I admire a lot of artists from different disciplines like Baggio, Zidane, Riquelme, Maradona and Cruyff, among others.

Tell us about your current projects.

I am currently in a self-imposed two-month residence in my studio, working full-time. I am producing and refining concepts in order to address the upcoming exhibitions scheduled for the new academic year, which will be announced at the appropriate time. 

I am following a similar path to the one shown at Aula 46 Art Gallery, but seeking a more careful and refined line, trying to go a step further and give a twist to the idea of painting. Trying, as much as possible, to generate a solid pictorial language true to myself, distinguishing myself from the trends in my environment. To generate an identity and strive to innovate. All this progress takes time and work, all the more so after an ambitious project like our previous exhibition.

Getting back in the ring and producing content that I feel satisfied with hasn’t been easy. Feeling comfortable again and noticing that I was actually accomplishing something was a slow and gradual process, but little by little it all seemed to make sense. Seeing the studio without my best pieces, not having them around, was hard to deal with, but the remedy was positive. I had to document myself, bring up new ideas, and understand these works as traces of latent work. 

Installation and work on space and sound are the aspects I am working on together with Elías to be able to offer good exhibitions with subject matter and content that can excite, raise awareness and be shared.

Interview by SVD
Photos: Courtesy of the artist