Aftermuse Kathy Bradford’s "Swim Paintings" at Aucocisco BY CHRIS THOMPSON

Here, in Kathy Bradford’s "Untitled," at last is an iceberg that one can trust.

It’s literally the polar opposite of the sneaky peak that upset the Titanic and the jagged crags that tore Caspar David Friedrich’s boat to bits in the Polar Sea. This one is decidedly low-key, layered in a stack and floating perfectly and harmlessly parallel to the boaters beholding it. It has a tip as broad as its base, which just about says it all. The scene bids farewell to the psychoanalytic orthodoxy summed up by the familiar tip-of-the-iceberg model, where the perceptible symptom refers back to and is produced by the impenetrable seething mass just below the surface.

But here there’s no artifice and there are no secrets. What matters for the four women on the boat in the foreground is their individual poise, along with the even spacing between them. They embody an understanding of interval, and appear concerned with little else. Thus they are able to float and look and be together, free from having to judge or be judged.

In a second iteration, "Untitled Two," the women hover on a frosted sea that washes over all but the uppermost protrusion of another iceberg; here again its form is as unthreatening as a pile of pancakes. But in this instance the mood is less tranquil, the space shot through with a burst of stage lights jostling with and supplanting one another in a flickering afterglow. Yet the women remain calm.

By the time of the third painterly variation on the theme, night is upon them. The lights have all but set, except for a few that twinkle in such a way that they appear now to be a blend of heavens and city skyline. The sturdy belt of Orion threads across the sky and joins with three lines of yellow lights strung at regular urban intervals, a kind of thickening of Whistler’s nocturne. The women’s heads are hung, ever so slightly. This solemnity without trace of pathos is perfectly suited to registering the import of their moment of kinship.

Painter Kathy Bradford says of this series of paintings of women in and on the water that they offer "a nod to Matisse’s circle of dancing women and perhaps to painters like John Marin and Childe Hassam who sometimes inserted cavorting nymphs into their seascapes. The figures in my painting, however, are women of the 21st century and are shown not as muses but rather as woman clearly enjoying each other."

There are important differences between the show’s images of the women in boats on settled seas and those of women swimming together. The obvious ones are the more intimate scale and inclusive and complex composition that characterize the swimming paintings. These contrast with the firm and reserved feel of the boaters, suggesting that the difference between the two groupings of women can be thought of as generational — as though the boaters are in some sense at once cryptic and straightforward, the elders in this watery realm.

The boaters seem both to bear witness and to keep watch — activities that would seem equivalent on the face of it but which in examining the paintings reveal themselves to be very different indeed. They are afloat on the surface of the water in which the younger women cavort and flirt with the notion of synchronizing themselves.

It should be said that they are perhaps not younger in terms of years — the faces and bodies of Bradford’s figures do not register age — but in terms of the social role that they enact: marking the passage through certain of life’s thresholds whilst observing and in some sense affirming the frolickings of the younger generation (who may nevertheless be older in years than they are).

"Water serves as a basis for women to gather in groups in a spirit of ritual and camaraderie," Bradford says, suggesting that in the interplay of images "a romantic notion of community is put forth. My intention is to examine utopian fantasies and to contemporize myth."

It is significant that the work represents the formal separation between these two modes of social intercourse. In this way, Bradford is able to create a world that speaks to our own precisely because of the fact that these worlds only touch glancingly and obliquely. The paradoxes and leaps in visual logic become the grammar that they use to talk to each other.

In the introduction to his book Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi considers the way that such forms of play make it possible for a writer to use the practice of writing to find her way through a particular conundrum, much as a painter might paint her way through a problem in order not to solve it but to pose it with greater clarity and richness.

"Generating a paradox and then using it as if it were a well-formed logical operator is a good way to put vagueness in play," he says. "Strangely, if this procedure is followed with a good dose of conviction and just enough technique, presto!, the paradox actually becomes a well-formed logical operator. Thought and language bend to it like light in the vicinity of a superdense heavenly body."

This is what Bradford’s paintings accomplish, this production of what Massumi calls "atypical expressions," openings to strange and intimate ways of thinking about, acting upon, being in, swimming in the world.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com

"Katherine Bradford: Swim Paintings" is at Aucocisco’s Congress Street gallery, in Portland, through May 28. Call (207) 775-2222.