PHILLIS IDEAL
THE Magazine, May 2013
Lauren Tresp
PHILLIS IDEAL
THE Magazine, May 2013
Lauren Tresp
Gallery is comprised of twenty-one abstract paintings in
a surprising, unpredictable palette. The title of the show,
Overlap, consistent with the titling of her pieces, is starkly
descriptive, and also provides a useful guide with which
to proceed in viewing. Overlap refers to Ideal’s process, in
which she layers and pieces together paint and elements
of collage. She often pours onto previous layers, allowing
the paint to flow organically in response to the preceding
episodes of mark-making. This practice of constructing an
image layer by layer is combined with gestural brushwork
and highly finished surface textures to result in “paintings”
that reward prolonged viewing. I refer to them as “paintings”
because Ideal’s practice is intimately rooted in materiality
and medium. Despite their smooth, two-dimensional
surfaces, the resulting artworks are more aptly referred
to as sculpted objects with presence and body, rather than
painted, disembodied images.
The most arresting aspect of this show is Ideal’s choice
of palette. Colors vary from dull grays, olive greens, and
passionate reds to crisp jolts of lime green and peachy coral.
In Conceal, Reveal (2010), clean, sweeping strokes of cerulean
blue frame a muddle of ochre and gray, bringing life and breath
to colors that previously hung stale and stagnant. The title
draws attention to the dual nature of a layering practice: the
frame-like composition creates a window to a moment that
has passed, a temperament that has since lost its will. Though
Conceal, Reveal is more minimal in its composition compared
to the more vivacious pieces in the exhibition, it epitomizes
the core visual and process-based motifs that characterize
the exhibition. Ideal’s layering illustrates a visual history of
the painting’s evolution while simultaneously concealing it,
transforming the image into something altogether new.
Off The Deep End, completed over the course of
four years, is a large, sixty-one by seventy-one inch acrylic
and collage on panel. Its more aggressive composition
illustrates a further duality that characterizes Ideal’s
work—the layering of flat expanses of color with painterly
brush strokes. Her brushwork, though exuberant and
seemingly spontaneous, reads as more confident than
reckless. A background of blasé olives, grays, and blues
is accentuated by stark blows of black, brown, and forest
green. Dissonant flashes of coral, lemony yellow, and sky
blue punctuate the stillness, bringing refreshing light and
levity to the whorl of gestural strokes.
In the diptych She Said He Said (2012), two panels
share the same highlights of lime green, but otherwise clash
in palette and composition. The title reflects an interest
in the opacity that results in the overlapping of visual and
material components. Each panel features expanses of
dense, static color, obscuring the painterly strokes that
preceded them. The left is dominated by a towering billow
of dusty rose. The right asserts an ominous cloud of black.
Hope for the seemingly incompatible compositions (or
couple?), however, is given in the spontaneous strokes of
lime green that unite Ideal’s surprising, non sequitur forms
and colors.
Formal variety occupies each painting. Where soft,
sweeping brush strokes meet blocks of dense color
and hard edges there is depth of composition, but also a
stratigraphic layering of the artworks’ evolution through
moods, disjunctive thoughts, and pulsations of energy.
Paint is ever-mutable under Ideal’s hand. The potential
for additional pours of pigment and continual overlapping
of visual or material elements is tempered only by highly
finished surface textures. The many contributing layers
of each image are smoothed into a sumptuous, velveteen
surface that breathes an air of hushed finality.
A relationship with Abstract Expressionism or Color
Field painting is evident, and has been commented on in
previous statements about Ideal’s work. But while Abstract
Expressionist painters sought out sublime, disembodied
images through the purity of paint, Ideal’s work is strikingly
different due to the patent materiality of her process. Her
method of pouring paint—of collaging elements together and
allowing them to influence how the paint takes shape—limits
her role as author. Instead, Ideal is something more akin to a
conductor, orchestrating the formal elements of her medium
until they have fulfilled their purpose. Rather than painting
a painting, she constructs it, grounding and embodying her
images in the process that creates them. The resulting art
objects are two-dimensional images inseparable from their
three-dimensional material bodies.
Phillis Ideal’s paintings probe and question: at
what point does paint become image? When, after
layering continuously, is the act of mark-making “done”?
When does the “painting” or “art” emerge? An awkwardly
collaged block of neon coral among romantic, painterly
swirls might be Ideal’s tongue-in-cheek answer. Perhaps
the inability to provide a satisfactory answer for these
questions is what imbues her paintings with momentum
and persistent vitality.
—Lauren Tresp
Download: PHILLIS IDEAL
THE Magazine, May 2013
Lauren Tresp
Associated Artist
Associated Exhibitions
- PHILLIS IDEAL OVERLAP
March 29, 2013 - May 4, 2013
MORE INFO
Associated News
-
April 9, 2019
Magdalena Gallery and Studio Tour -
March 12, 2018
Painting with Big Mama
Vasari21, 03/12/2018
Ann Landi
-
May 20, 2016
"Under the Radar", featuring Phillis Ideal -
March 15, 2016
Digital meets analog: New drawings made on the iPhone by Phillis Ideal presented at David Richard Gallery
ArtDaily.org, 03/15/2016
-
March 9, 2016
Press Release - Phillis Ideal "Urban Energy" -
May 1, 2013
PHILLIS IDEAL
THE Magazine, May 2013
Lauren Tresp
-
April 19, 2013
Press Release - Phillis Ideal "Overlap"