PHILLIP ALLEN
ON LISTENING TO PHILLIP ALLENāS PAINTINGS
By Phil King
Phillip Allenās paintings include their noise and are not content to sit obediently as mute āļ¬guresā to be read on and against a wall āgroundā. While they obviously donāt make actual noise, they donāt tune anything out. And they seem to resist not just singular contexts and categories, but also exclusive digital accounting in general. In this, they remind us of the power of static, of old television sets hissing when they are le on far into the early hours...a lost memory between channels. Static combines noise and impossible visuals in a marginal, best occluded, moment. Where it used to be a sort of night-bound unconsciousness, visible a er broadcasting hours, it is now something lost to digital clarity and 24-hour broadcasting; it is a slated-to-be forgo en artifact, a confusion of sound and vision deleted from ever-more-streamlined existences.
Current digitalized forms of a ention work not by simply tuning out such unwanted noise; they gain authority from the fact that, for them, unwanted noise simply doesnāt count. Usually, something to be tuned out distracts a ention and is preferably unnoticed; now, it simply falls obsolete, unaccounted for between the digits that make everything accountable. Overwhelmed by a sheer quantity of visual material and commentary, by too much confusing static, we o en rely on clear forceful narratives to guarantee some kind of agency and place in the world. We count on legible ļ¬gures to make sense of the complex ground of messy and untuned general experience. We might prefer and pretend
that numerate clarity is what guarantees art and our investments in it, and yet...
Faced with a title such as DeepDrippings (Upper Maze Version), we ļ¬nd that it is le to the stuļ¬ of paint itself to remind us that art can stand against all kinds of baited allures, and that this is a painting that stands up to the logical clarity of its title ā we discover that the paint itself revolts from any intended and presupposed program. The paint in the actual painting allows a sensation of dappled light to be loosely created, a sensation created out of a sense of excavation in which we do not know what we will ļ¬nd. We are faced with the very thing that tight-lipped investment cults tune out in obedience to the demands of clear discourse and measurable identities. Voluminous paint is presented as a kind of protest against implicit injunctions to ānot noticeā and to ākeep to pious silenceā. It hangs resistant and noticeable on the wall. These sometimes sinuous paintings are their own wayward devices le for us to pitch headlong into, devices in key with dominant entropic out-of-tune realities, in tune with a basic, underlying, bodily disorganization. This body is impossible to identify, an unknown that, while not wholly comprehensible, is very real, impressive, and at the very limit of audio/visual imagination. If there are ļ¬gures that appear and insist ā and each painting can be grasped as such a ļ¬gure, stark and grounded against a wall āthese insistent appearances all feel part of a resonant sanguine realism, a chain of meanings in which artistic perfection and lifeās imperfection operate as one pragmatic thing. Beauty and ugliness act together, and art and life are a single, all-inclusive, manifold discovery, along with the old and the new that we vainly try to choose between. Clarity and waste cohere as one out-of-tune note, or rather sound, dug back up as a singular, moving evocative outline in each painting ā a serpentine oļ¬ering in
which everything counts without measure, but in which everything also trips itself up.
Sometimes itās hard to remember that painting can be the enemy of painting, but when we do remember this, things can make a lot more sense, and not just for painters. Through his paintings, Phillip Allen reminds us, and I suspect himself, that paintingās actual power is to be an enemy of painting. There is painting, and there is painting against painting. Perhaps it is in this paradoxical realization that artās necessary unity with anti-art can be best experienced. There is a kind of suspense ā of opposing forces holding each other hostage...stumbling out of time.
Painting and its own worst, deadly, anti-pictorial, anti-idealistic, anti-artistic enemy are reconciled again and again. What each painting is comprised of is at one with what it excludes...literally, this painter includes what he has scraped oļ¬, so what has been scraped from each painting brings new life into the old art school truism: āWhatās not there (in a painting) is as important as what is.ā What has been removed from the painting is the painting, and what weāre le with is that endlessly noisy stuļ¬ that appeals to all our senses at once: paint.
And what is paint but color? But to realize this simple, obvious fact, we must discard a lot of what we think about color. We must realize that color is a material force in and of itselfāfree of both science and romance.
Phillip Allenās paintings seem able to present color as a kind of le over reality that somehow has the power to insistāwith tremendous force and compressed intensity. When we view his paintings in groups, experiencing them laid out in exhibitions, a sense of diļ¬erent self-contained
intensitiesālined up and insistent, waiting togetherāis created. To reach for a legible art historical precedent, I am tempted to dig up Jean Fautrierās Hostage paintings, which were painted during World War II. They are a chain of unique modest-size paintings that are connected in the bones of their material nature to the traumas of the French occupation and to atrocities carried out by Nazis in the woods near ChĆ¢tenayMalabry and heard by Fautrier as he hid terriļ¬ed in a house nearby. The current stakes, obviously, are not so grimly life and death, but there is a sense of something existentially serious in Allenās work. And there is a sensation that he is tapping into an incongruously sensuous elegance that is also an incongruous part of Fautrierās own bleak painterly sensibility. Both painters oļ¬er us paint as ācookedā material working to create and embody the nature of color and light in intractable āstuļ¬.ā This is painting as beautiful, tempting appearance despite the literal ma er of fact presentation of its basic ingredients. This is painting as imaginative, lumpen body of work, as an experience in which haunting old sounds synesthetically ļ¬icker. It is my feeling that, in his paintings, Allen excavates such visions, scrapes away their ļ¬gures in order to leave his paint and colour with the ability to echo and hiss.
Insistent waiting speaks to a generally hard-to-quantify quality-of-art experience. Allenās paintings as a group give us art as a form of deferral in which meaning is imprisoned in paint itself (and its color). They immediately claim the power and ability to put us in āart timeā and experience its longing. While there is a sense of a measured output, there is also a sense that this measure does not adequately convey the nature of the paintings themselves, that they escape being organized to a set schedule. They are at one with āanother timeā combining as an entropic new form whose sanguine horizon somehow beats the clock and escapes its
representations. This deep time is measured by a kind of pulse of resistant actuality ā one both visceral and mundane. Here are paintings that beat to the tempo of an uncoordinated beat rather than the metronomic regularity that counts our waking seconds and the moments of our professionalized lives. Senses themselves become confused within an event in which fugitive shapes (waveforms, and even ļ¬gures) have a life (color and brightness) that appears and, just as importantly, disappears. Phillip Allen scrapes and discovers, until all is but a persistent trace. That forgo en sounds can infect the fading rhythms within his compelling visual horizons appears as a continual surprise.
Phil King is co-editor at Turps Magazine and works in both the United Kingdom and France. He has wri en numerous catalogue essays on contemporary artists and he also translated The Studio of Giacome i by Jean Genet. He graduated from Bath Academy of Art in 1987 and received an MA from Goldsmiths College of the University of London in 1993.
12 1ā4 x 10 1ā2 inches
x 26.7 cm
DeepDrippings (HissOvian Version), 2020
Oil on board
31.1
1ā4 x 10 1ā2 inches
DeepDrippings (Canary of the Mind), 2020
Oil on board
12
31.1 x 26.7 cm
16 1ā2 x 14 1ā2 inches
41.9 x 36.8 cm
DeepDrippings (Flied and Focsu Version), 2019
Oil on board
1ā2 x 14 1ā2 inches
41.9 x 36.8 cm
DeepDrippings (Steam Room Version), 2019
Oil on board
16
DeepDrippings (Hiss Mystique Deep North Version), 2019
Oil on board
16 1ā2 x 14 1ā2 inches
41.9 x 36.8 cm
DeepDrippings (Hiss Mystique Mireovian Version), 2019
Oil on board
16 1ā2 x 14 1ā2 inches
41.9 x 36.8 cm
20 1ā2 x 18 3ā4 inches
52.1 x 47.6 cm
DeepDrippings (Upper Maze Version), 2020
Oil on board
20 1ā2 x 18 3ā4 inches
52.1 x 47.6 cm
DeepDrippings (International Hiss Version), 2019
Oil on board
20 1ā2 x 18 3ā4 inches
52.1 x 47.6 cm
DeepDrippings (Studio Hiss Version), 2020 Oil on board
20 1ā2 x 18 3ā4 inches
x 47.6 cm
DeepDrippings (HissJovian Vision Version), 2020
Oil on board
52.1
DeepDrippings (Midnight Austin Laze Version), 2020
Oil on board
25 1ā2 x 21 inches
64.8 x 53.3 cm
25 1ā2 x 21 inches
64.8 x 53.3 cm
DeepDrippings (Lovejouvian Version Version), 2020
Oil on board
25 1ā2 x 21 inches
64.8 x 53.3 cm
DeepDrippings (LoveJovian Hiss Version), 2020
Oil on board
DeepDrippings (Revenge of the Surface Version 2), 2020
Oil on board
42 x 32 inches
106.7 x 81.3 cm
PHILLIP ALLEN
Born in 1967 in London, United Kingdom
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
EDUCATION
1990ā1992
MA Fine Art, Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom
1987ā1990
BA Fine Art, Kingston University, London, United Kingdom
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2020
Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
2019
āDeepdrippings,ā Approach Gallery, London, United Kingdom
āDeepdrippings,ā Luca Tommasi Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy
2017
āDeepdrippings,ā Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
2016
DOLPH Projects, London, United Kingdom
2014
āTonic for Choice,ā The Approach, London, United Kingdom
2013
āOxblood,ā Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
39 Mitchell Street, London, United Kingdom
2011
āCapital P,ā The Approach, London, United Kingdom
2010
āā¦The Urgent Hang Around,ā Bernier/Eliades Gallery, Athens, Greece
2009
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
2008
āSloppy Cuts No Ice,ā The Approach W1, London, United Kingdom
2007
āPaintings & Drawings,ā Xavier Hu ens, Brussels, Belgium
2006
Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
2005
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
āOne Man Show,ā Xavier Hu ens, Brussels, Belgium
2004
The Approach, London, United Kingdom
2003
Xavier Hu ens, Brussels, Belgium
āPhillip Allen: Recent Paintings,ā
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY
2002
The Approach, London, United Kingdom
1999
The Approach, London, United Kingdom
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2019
āThe Aerodrome,ā Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom
2017
ā20 Years,ā The Approach, London, United Kingdom
āFully Awake,ā Blip Blip Blip Gallery, Leeds, United Kingdom
2016
āThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly,ā Charlie Smith, London, United Kingdom
āPermeable Edge,ā University of Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom
2015
āFrom a Fly on the Wall, to Fly in my Soup,ā Galerie Dukan, Paris, France
āGhe o Anglaise,ā Observer Building, Hastings, United Kingdom
2014
āNanjing International Art Exhibition,ā International Exhibition Centre, Nanjing, China
āHead To Head: 4 Questions 8 Paintings,ā Standpoint Gallery, London, United Kingdom
2012
āCourtship of the Peoples,ā Simon Oldļ¬eld Gallery, London, United Kingdom
āThe Perfect Nude,ā Charlie Smith, London, United Kingdom
āThe Perfect Nude,ā Phoenix Gallery, Exeter, United Kingdom
2011
āFrom London:,ā Art Nueve, Murcia, Spain
āThe Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2011,ā Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom
2010
Fabio Tiboni Arte Contemporanea, Bologna, Italy
2009
āClassiļ¬ed: Contemporary British art at Tate Britain,ā Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom
āKaleidoscopic Revolver,ā Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea and Hanjiyun Contemporary Space, Beijing, China
āPa ern Recognition,ā The City Gallery, Leicester, United Kingdom
2008
āM25: Around Londonā (curated by Barry Schwabsky), Centro Cultural Andratx, Mallorca, Spain
2007
āLayer Cakeā (curated by Martin Holman), Fabio Tiboni Arte Contemporanea, Bologna, Italy
āHope and Despairā (curated by Bob Ma hews), Cell Project Space, London, United Kingdom
āSummer Group Show,ā Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
2006
āArchipeinture: Painters Build Architecture in London,ā Camden Arts Centre, London, United Kingdom and Le Plateau, Frac Ćle-de France, Paris, France
āWhen Forms Become A itude,ā AR / Contemporary Gallery, Milan, Italy
2005
āBritish Art Show 6ā (organized by the Hayward Gallery and the British Council), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom, traveled to Manchester; No ingham; Bristol; City Art Gallery, Prague; Vilnius, Lithuania; Tallinn, Estonia and Krakow, Poland
āFantasy Island,ā Metropole Galleries, Folkestone, United Kingdom
2004
āStay Positive,ā Marella Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy
āCandyland Zoo,ā Herbert Read Gallery, University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom
āReļ¬ections,ā Atuatuca Art Festival, Tongeren, Belgium
āPainting-04,ā Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
2003
āCristian Ward, Phillip Allen, Varda Caivano,ā Milleļ¬ori Art Space, Athens, Greece
āAllen, Cooper, McDevi ,ā Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
āDirty Pictures,ā The Approach, London, United Kingdom
āPost Flat: New Art from London,ā Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
āThe Drawing Show,ā Keith Talent Gallery, London, United Kingdom
2002
āAnother Shi y Day in Paradise,ā Bart Wells Institute, London, United Kingdom
āThe Galleries Show: Contemporary Art in London,ā Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom
1997
āCardboard Box and Tape,ā Norwich Gallery, Norwich School of Art and Design, Norwich, United Kingdom
āStill Things,ā The Approach, London, United Kingdom
āMultiple Choice,ā Cubi Gallery, London, United Kingdom
1996
āGrin and Bear It, Gasworks, London, United Kingdom
Abbey Scholar, British School of Rome, Rome, Italy
SELECT COLLECTIONS
Arts Council England, London, United Kingdom
British Council, London, United Kingdom
Tate Collection, London, United Kingdom
UK Government Art Collection, London, United Kingdom
Published on the occasion of the exhibition
PHILLIP ALLEN
21 May ā 11 July 2020
Miles McEnery Gallery
520 West 21st Street
New York NY 10011
tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com
Publication Ā© 2020 Miles McEnery Gallery
All rights reserved Essay Ā© 2020 Phil King
Director of Publications
Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY
Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY
Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA
Catalogue layout by McCall Associates, New York, NY
ISBN: 978-1-949327-30-4
Cover: DeepDrippings (Studio Hiss Version), (detail), 2020