Peter Phillips at Thomas Gibson - London, England - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This was the first substantial exhibition in Britain of works by means of English-born artist Peter Phillips since his 1982-83 touring retrospective titled "Retrovision," which appeared at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, the Museum of present Art, Oxford, the Walker Art' Gallery, Liverpool and elsewhere. Phillips, however, has been showing regularly in Switzerland and Spain, countries where he has lived since the late 1960 At age 59 he continues to disclose the fragmented imagery and refined painting technique for which he first became internationally known in the mid-1960s as single of the foremost British explosion artists.

The 10 novel large oil paintings on view here direct the eye like photo-collages, but they are meticulously hand-painted. Each canvas features an arrangement of hard-edge abstract shapes and rectangular images based upon still-life photos that the artist commissioned for use in the paintings. These labor-intensive canvases are made without the help of photoprojection techniques, although critic John McEwen, in this show's catalogue essay, hints that the artist set together these elaborate compositions with the help of a computer

The approximately 56-by-40-inch canvas Personal Knots exhibits objects such as a lightbulb, a ball of string, and sum of two units standing wooden figures that gaze like works of tribal art, all arranged in a unbind grid and set against a background of abstract geometric shapes. The abstract elements--circles, rectangles and squares, painted in acidic colors recall those in early modernist works, especially compositions by dint of Auguste Herbin. In the painted images, Phillips's skillful brushwork flows in textural nuances that parallel those of the various materials he paints: coarseness in the depiction of a ball of string, for instance, contrasts with the slickly reflective surface of a glass scaly bud or the smoothly sanded perceive of a statue's fine wood-grain.

azure Ram (58 5/8 by 40 1/2 inches) is individual of the most striking works in the display Here, a wildly swirling galaxy in the upper left is calculatored by a number of rigidly geometric circles and dots that appear scattered above the surface. Various images, including a tin angel, a zebra, fishhooks and a flower, are dominated by means of a horizontal image in of great depth blue which shows a ram standing before a small tripod placed upon the seat of an ordinary dining play chair. This mysterious vignette implies a show of ancient worship and sacrifice. Sometimes the startling juxtapositions of images put in mind of complicated interweavings of private obsessions and autobiographical easy in mind However, Phillips never offers more than a hint of specific meaning.

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