New works by

Bradley Boboc

In downtown Los Angeles’s Toy District, commerce unfolds in a riot of color, language, and objects: hand-painted signs, banners, overflowing displays, and goods from everywhere in the world. Bradley Boboc brings this visual and cultural energy into his paintings, transforming the language of the neighborhood’s wholesalers and street vendors into a vocabulary of his own. Text appears throughout the series, recalling the hand-painted signage and commercial ephemera that fill the area. These sources often distort and merge languages, and Boboc adopts the resulting blend of English, Spanish, French, and Chinese—an abstracted, universal vernacular that both traces and embellishes the origins of goods on offer.

Though text may seem at odds with the conventions of still life, it draws out the painterly quality of the district’s storefront displays. Hair gel, lipstick, and sunglasses gather on brightly colored tablecloths, staging arrangements that parody the opulence of Chardin and Cézanne. Traditional and contemporary references move freely through the work, compressing time and space.

Spiritual, medicinal, and cosmetic products recur throughout the exhibition, pointing to the quasi-religious character of the objects themselves. Intrigued by the esoteric oils sold in the area’s botánicas, marketed to improve one’s fortunes in love, business, gambling, and beyond, Boboc treats each object as a distinct wish or negotiation. In paintings such as Les Pills and Vogade, this idea is pushed toward satire, asking viewers to reconcile the complexity of prayer within the marketplace.

Extending this theme of devotion, Boboc appoints a new class of women saints. Echoing Warhol’s use of screen-printed photographs as a foundation for portraiture, he uses handmade stencils to render the likenesses of Zoë Lund, Debbie Harry, and Candy Darling. Each endured intense scrutiny despite her talent, and each has come to embody resistance to the destructive, illogical, hypermasculine structures that govern society.

In combining this wide range of subject matter, Boboc constructs a vision of painting that parallels the energy and complex origins of rock music. The title of the exhibition, Shadoobie (Shattered), is a nod to the Rolling Stones song “Shadoobie,” which speaks to a sense of existential frustration in navigating a decaying society. For Boboc, however, the unrest suggested by the title becomes something more physical and immediate in the paintings, expressed through dark colors, thickly applied paint, and obtrusive text. While often cynical and rough on the surface, Boboc’s work highlights the enduring nature of the human spirit and its impulse to question, create, and resist forces that aim to silence creativity and independent thought.

BIO: Bio Bradley Boboc (b.1995) is a self-taught artist living and working in Los Angeles. A painter interested in fusing the still life genre with advertisement and abstraction, Boboc's forthcoming exhibition Shadoobie (Shattered) serves as a window into the artist's practice. Taking a layered approach to superimpose a wide array of source material, his paintings explore themes of neopaganism, wealth, beauty, and decay within the context of the global market.