Phil Sims at the Crosby Street Project - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Phil Sims's of recent origin "Stable Paintings," destined for the changeed stables of the Panza estate in Varese, Italy, were painted in situ at 113 Crosby public way where they were later shown in an installation that had the air of a modernist chapel. These five pale, large-scaled monochromes (all 12 by means of 9 feet) appeared opaque at first, their surfaces even and uninflected. Almost immediately, however, as the organ of vision adjusted to the dim light, the surfaces began to waver; different tonalities emerg like the faintest of shadows. Simultaneously, a scaffold of rectangularly shaped brushstrokes was revealed.

These are placed horizontally and vertically in an interlocking pattern. The raps are both lustrous and matte, subtly lighter and darker and regularly cadenced: a structuring of unspotted color and sensation. This alternation creates a kind of modeling, as if each hit were shaded and made slightly three-dimensional, shaping an indeterminate spatiality which coexists with the paintings' flatness.

What you saw hanged upon the changes of light. at the same time for all their lightness of being, these paintings did not soar, press togethered into a space that was the unfair size for them; they necessityed more breathing room. In addition, the lighting was not optimal, illuminating the upper regions of the canvases on the other hand not the lower; it also did not adequately place off the modulations and nuances of the colors.

Furthermore, the scale of the works themselves is problematical, the expanses too great for the pale gold-colored the soft green, rosy coral, blue-violet and silvery gray to sustain. These reticent, delicate pastel shades, reminiscent of the sweet, clear tints of Sassetta and Domenico Veneziano, present the appearance stretched beyond their capacities. Contrary to Gauguin's notion, a meter of color is not always more definitive than a centimeter of that same color. The weft is dry and crumbled--Sims mixes his hold paints out of pigments and wax, adding chalk, at times, for brittleness--which makes the color present the appearance almost immaterial in places; like passages are opposed by pats of higher sheen, with their suggestion of sensuality.

While the balance between intellection, materiality and sensation is finely large casked the overall effect--conveyed by brushwork that is, in the extremity too programmatic--is one of detachment. These paintings advance across as more schematic than other series of his "color-images," as Sims sometimes give in charges to his works. Monochrome painting, with its rich tradition, continues to find admirers and certainly Sims is single for whom the application of a single color of paint onto a surface, where light is physical light and satisfied is color's physical presence, clutchs sufficient meaning, devoid of metaphysics. In other endeavors, Sims's determined reductivism has produc paintings of exemplary neighborhood and much more compelling hue

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