There is more paint and more painting on Jay Phillips’ new enamel-on-aluminum paintings than on his earlier work. Phillips’ paint is now deeper and weightier; the pieces here have a palpable surface, an enamel skin which carries a record of the layered depth trapped between the surface and the impenetrable metal. Like their predecessors, they are a collection of horizontally abutted patterns—stripes, checks, polka dots—set against or on top of fields of loose, excited paint, and the occasional solid color, all fashioned in gloss enamel and bright colors on an aluminum support which is cut and twisted to form an actual space in and in front of the paintings. Like their colors, the paintings’ workings are harsh and vibrant. The painted patterns mimic the placement of the folded aluminum; they advance, recede, and slide across one another in the flat, parallel, comfortable space of Modern painting.
In spite of their awkward materials and boisterous relationships, most of Phillips’ paintings live in that comfortable space. Their most effective resource and their biggest drawback are their good looks; they feel like art, a priori. They have an elegance and seriousness, on the one hand, and a finish and distance, on the other, that recall art in a museum, blue chips; and they haven’t risked enough to earn that pedigree. Phillips’ works are stylish, like most new painting; they look modern rather than contemporary. But they aren’t the collections of tagged period styles, the edgy and alienated petitions to history, of the new expressionism. They don’t suffer from a lack of belief, but from too much.
In the recent paintings, Phillips has introduced a painted space that separates them from his earlier work with its collaged, planar spaces. In the center panels of three of the exhibition’s four major works, and just off center in the last, Phillips has built landscapes. Painted in arcs and sprays of green and brown that cluster at, or grow from, the bottom of blue fields, these landscapes are just notations, more narrative than illusion, but they imply landscape’s expansive space. They are openings, pictures that render the patterns around them frames. No matter where it is, the landscape becomes the painting’s subject.
The titles of the two best paintings here, La Fayette Park and Westlake, are taken from Los Angeles–area parks. These pieces, like all of Phillips’ paintings, are cut and folded along the edges. The cuts are the paintings’ drawing; they are more clearly representational, more “made” than the collected patterns, than even the landscape. La Fayette Park carries the most stolid and symmetrical of Phillips’ compositional cuts. The painting’s flat expanse ends on both sides in a vaselike form that is cut from the aluminum and partially covered by its reverse, the shaped flap created on the outer side of the cut, an awkward, almost human figure which is bent over and into the painting. The surface is opened and covered at the center not only by the landscape but by an arc-shaped aperture and its own bent-over flap.
Within the narrative, inside the park, all of Phillips’ patterns are pulled away from their physical and metaphorical flatness. They are thick and worried over; they lose some of the simplicity and independence of pattern. They too begin to look “made.” The vertical stripes of a slender striped panel are touched with chiaroscuro. They threaten to round like columns—metaphors, like the vase, for the figure. And diagonal grids in a second panel are elongated and painted in pointed pairs of color; they recall Picasso’s harlequin, or Theo Van Doesberg’s interior decoration. Finally, the patterns seem representational, as if they are always on, or are always worn by, something else.
While his paintings have become more painterly, the “Dressers,” as Phillips calls his painted pedestal works, have become more sculptural. The “Park Dressers,” a series of steel multiples, or rather a group of individual paintings on blanks of die-cut and welded steel, are physically heavier than their handmade, freestanding aluminum predecessors, and they are iconographically weighted as well. They are a compendium of Phillips’ motifs; the pillar and the palm leaves are joined and curved toward the viewer, yet half hidden beneath the vase and its humanoid inverse and the arc. With their shared name, their scale, and their enclosed cabinet format, the “Dressers” imply that they are private, to be lived with. They are objets d’art, collectibles. They carry wealth as a text; the steel blank of one of the “Park Dressers” is simply yet elegantly sheathed in copper plate. The preciousness of the “Dressers,” like the paintings’ artness, is, at least in part, a positive attribute—it’s how the “Dressers” work. And the two attributes may be the same.
—Howard Singerman
