Friday, January 29, 2016

Phil Argent "Misaligned" @ Shoshana Wayne


Untitled (Mind the Gap), 2015
Acrylic on canvas
84” x 72” x 1 1/2”







Untitled (Endless Fences II), 2014
Acrylic on canvas
72” x 56” x 1 1/2”







Untitled (Waffle cone), 2014
Acrylic on canvas over panel
35” x 27” x 2”






Sea Within a Sea (Shadow), 2014
Acrylic on canvas
84” x 72” x 1 1/2”




Untitled (Sick Glass), 2014
Acrylic on canvas
72” x 56” x 1 1/2”





Untitled (Monster), 2015
Acrylic on canvas over panel
23” x 21 1/2” x 2“






Untitled, 2014
Acrylic on canvas
70” x 50” x 1 1/2”







Untitled (Displaced), 2015
Acrylic on canvas
40” x 30” x 1 1/2”


Untitled (Scuttle), 2015
Acrylic on canvas
40” x 30” x 1 1/2”




Untitled (Drift is OK), 2015
Acrylic on canvas
40” x 30” x 1 1/2”



Key Ingredient, 2015
Acrylic on canvas
38” x 52” x 1 1/2”

What it proposes about surface interaction in terms of communication (interlocking potentials and irregularities). Sometimes a fit, sometimes not. But color connects and verifies, clarifies. That said, the pictures here function more as diagram than pure visual effect of said communication.  That is to say, they illustrate the points without much of them being the points. Imagistic, photographic/print-oriented facture. Pictorial digital interface. Video game movement a la Pac Man meets Mondrian. And the watery sign of painting. Organic, fluid process meets, interacts, and integrates with orders, logical systems and signs. Zipper effect. Interlocking edges (human made and natural) attempting to suture the way logic and emotion might, if we could be visualizing such a relationship here. Yes.  Layers and Windows onto worlds. Touches, smears, and departures. Catch and release. Snapshot engage. Postulating an opening onto infinite. What acrylic paint can do. Flatten and refer to artificial color and industrial era. What can it now say in a post-digital age of painting? Somewhere between psychedelic haze (posters) and current light-based technologies (phones, tablets, et al). Just a little too graphic for my tastes ultimately, but what isn't anymore? Explode, cut and tear. Collage. Jane Callister. Kim Fisher. Distant Warholian palimpsest in terms of style (print decay. repeated painting).  Balancing forces uprightly in orientations and so reference to human portrait with occasional landscape.

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