Richard Phillips at Friedrich Petzel - New York - Brief Article

The luridly figured, grid-based mechanics of Richard Phillips's cycle of paintings, "America" (2001), seem more closely related to the stenciled layers of John Clem Clarke's hazy art-historical borrowings of the early 1970s than to the seamless look of computer scans favored by artists today. These large-scale works seemed randomly selected from a loosely organized registry of special-interest images and robed in the mantle of freedom of expression. The President of the United States of America, a 13-foot-long tabloidlike grisaille of the current commander in chief, jaunty on a field of American stars and bracketed by fuchsia Neo-Geo bars, seemed to engage in laconic conversation with the puttied figures of Liberation Monument, an image cropped from a photograph of George Segal's Stonewall memorial. A third indifferently painted grisallie, Old Granddad, replicated the iconic trademark of the bourbon of the same name. Phillips's remaining paintings, in living color, found their special interests in erogenous zones.

And then, as has often been remarked in recent weeks, the world changed. A senior critic for a major metropolitan newspaper, caught up in the "pure, desperate projection" of the moment, suggested that it might be possible to find a candidate for Mount Rushmore in the satisfied countenance of a previously uninteresting president. In the intense fluorescence of the painting's hard-edge bars, the critic proposed, there breathes a hybrid union of patriotic red and blue. By further extension, the unsmiling figures in somber, fraternal embrace that had been excerpted from Segal's relatively joyless monument to sexual liberation began to resemble rescue workers covered in ash.

The penciled lines of Phillips's grid are visible under the painted skin of each of these canvases, rehearsed in the overall layering of gold leaf in Liberation Monument, testament to the reverently handmade labor of Phillips's exercise. In each work, an expanse of negative space indicates a formal preoccupation with the relationship of figure and ground.

On the other hand, Phillips offered more jaded viewers Negation of the Universe, an adolescent sexual fantasy of studied coolness from the pubic [sic] domain of the World Wide Web. A playful rumination on Courbet's famous study of a woman's pudendum, The Origin of the World, it is enlivened by a remarkable feat of projectile ejaculation. If the provocative lesbian innuendo of The Bourgeois mirrored two curly-locked nymphets in lazy tete-a,-tete, Phillips's Artist awarded rosy-nippled hauteur to a subject closely resembling the snotty, party-girl portraits of commodity watercolorist Delia Brown. However timely, heroic or erotic these works' claim to attention proves to be, Phillips appropriately celebrates his freedom to play it as it lays.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group