2024-03-30 22:24:45
–You can’t ditch a text whose principal objective was ditching texts–
“Time Crunch” 2023 26 x 25 in. Flashe on linen,
John Philips’s biomorphic abstraction systematically undermines formalist subjects and context with rhetorical mischief. He paints the corners like a setup man, stays ahead in the count, keeps his eye on music playlists, and slldes from analog to digital and back. He’s conjured Pop-Op etudes that surgically modify neglected Ab-Ex and Hard-Edge manners. Resilient chromatics and hi-fidelity design have yielded long innings of compositional hybrids that carry content and allow space for arbitration.
Phillips external influences were once films. He loosely adapted plot structure, sets, and psychology and played a collaborative, popular medium against the secluded agency of the painting studio. His large-scale abstractions chewed up the unconventional architecture of German Expressionist cinema and Hollywood Film Noir. Later he reduced scale and absorbed media sprung from the history of America’s first popular art form, concentrating on sonic formulas and codes from 50’s R&B, primitive Rock, and early Soul Music. Their graphic translations come up for air in sinuously performative, radically hued, canvases. His production became aligned with sequences of popular beats, chromatics, and diminished chords riffing on the toil of un-naming hybrid abstraction.
Once Phillips’s music influences were thoroughly integrated, he began to overlay lively, medicinally euphoric, illusions. Their pharmaceutical schemata weren’t with critical or investigative intent, more suggestive of habitual or libidinal fantasies that evoked an architecture and pattern of abandon. Sizable floating lozenges, colored smoke rings, and lurking afterimages reigned supreme. Rather than being about sensation, his pictures explored an existential channel of late modern and contemporary image-making that referenced cool, uncanny, ironic, sometimes prohibited behavior.
“Jungle Fantasy” 2021, 51 x 47 in. Flashe on canvas
The consequence of painted forms in space, that don’t depend on spectator demographics or performance metrics, are formidable as they’re constructed from complex historical texts and images born from even earlier historical texts and images. If we forget what they mean, we can housetrain them, is what Phillips is saying, i.e., link them to the present rather than let their monumentality bully us. Even though time has distanced them to a near untranslatable plane, their silence is episodic, especially compared to many current extra-disciplinary curatorial models. It’s not necessary to blend social science and painting, or philosophy and painting, or anthropology and painting. Time has pre-amalgamated and radicalized them. Re-clothed art content isn’t militant or activist but ideological, and a suitable method for rendering critical subjects like identity (which is ambiguous), and time, (which is indefinite). Paintings like Phillips’s covert re-interpretation of art as sub-chronicle allows for debate and esteems the avant-garde by paying it forward.
“Mr. Bill’s Dream” 2023, 57 x 56 in. Flashe on linen
Phillips’s minimal choice of forms in spiraling compositions of viscous color and massaged filaments are thrust into contemplative painterly intervals. In “Time Crunch” and “Jungle Fantasy,” elastic squiggles and diffused shadows make one acutely aware of vantage points and plastic retinal interference calculated post-mathematically. They’re distillations of Pop versus Hard Edge, both divided by Minimalism and Vernacular squared, then burnished – then varnished.
Phillips doesn’t exactly quote or sample art language. He enhances a perception like one might of a former affair, producing a piquant, chronological infidelity. He easily prompts deep, sequential, and comparative desire analogies since paintings and lovers are persistently occupied with seduction. Even routine issues that Phillips retrieves and enhances from a reductivist past, like tactile surfaces and swaying spaces, lend themselves to allegories of desire, intoxication, loss, and doubt. In most abstraction anxiety paradigms and indulgent reflections remain repressed and under-theorized.
“The Bongo Boo Boo” 2022, 78 x 66 in. Flashe on canvas
The Bongo Boo Boo” is a poem of pliant halo forms on a pulsating but subtle dream state magnetic field. It’s a parody of illusion. It’s vaporous but presents like a text, like a grammatical construction, or a cried-over page of sheet music. You can sense the work’s progressions the way you feel sound. It’s royally untamed, with imperfect melodies of red dust and lavender.
“Slippin’ In” 2021, 51 x 47 in. Flashe on linen
A prickly attitude about contemporary artists is that they’ve become technology zealots and image polluters, thus hard to defend in a culture increasingly immersed in meta-fiction and sociography.The rhythms of Phillips’s abstraction, however, demonstrate that fresh considerations of instinct and craft defer caustic narratives embedded in multiple tributaries of object-making. The compositions of Phillips reveal a beautiful grammar of paint utopia ensconced in a serviceable dream-state present, distanced from time-clocking historical inevitability. Phillips doesn’t dread an implausible, or unimaginable future. His “chemo-grams” and polyvinyl atmospheres tender culture that has always been indulgent and at risk, pleasure-seeking and contaminated – fun and no fun, arguing for a qualitative present more in touch with a quantifiable past.
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