Phillis Ideal - Critic Statements

CRITIC STATEMENTS:
DAVID CRAVEN / KATHLEEN WHITNEY / MICHELLE FALKENSTEIN

CROSS-BRED PAINTINGS AS UNLEAVENED RELIEFS, OR THE STRATIFIED IMAGES OF PHILLIS IDEAL

DAVID CRAVEN

      Cross-pollination between painting and various other visual forms, such as sculpture, has led in recent years to a rejuvenation of painting per se, rather than to the much anticipated dissolution of painting as an independent force. By drawing on the hybrid condition of unrestrained interaction between only marginally linked images and materials, painting has re-emerged from its once moribund high modernist position based on "medium purity" -- which is, after all, the aesthetic counterpart to excessive artistic inbreeding, if not aesthetic incest. (A case in point here is the exceedingly anemic look of Washington Colorfield paintings from the early 1960s onward, with their obsessive fixation on so-called "medium self-purification" a la Greenberg. In fact, "Less was less" in that case, not the reverse.)

      As such, renewal has often happened in the painting of the late 1990s and beyond, owing to how a group of U.S. painters are gleaning some significant lessons from the ascendancy of installation art over the once dominant Western tradition of painting. Revealingly, installation art is important not as a medium, or even as a cluster of media, but as a means of orchestrating various media and materials from disparate places into unlikely new relationships replete with a battery of novel perceptual experiences. Similarly, the new painting is not notable for its distance from other media, but for its newly "impure" dialogue of material approximation to them. With respect to divergent media, difference is not a barrier but a stimulus, less a border than a spur, to the pictorial genesis of fresh points of aesthetic intersection that diminish material distinctions even as their visual panache comes from an entanglement of them.

      The current paintings of Phillis Ideal, with their Caribbean-like palette and slippery figure/ground relationships, are fine examples of the above noted tendencies of the new painting to gain newfound independence through an uncanny new dialogue with other visual traditions that are then deftly reconfigured. Some of the brash new paintings by Ideal come by their sly neo-dada sense through a cagy interchange with the early Dadaist wood-reliefs of Jean Arp. Under the banner that "art is like a fruit," Arp created a series of incorrigibly organic images like The Plant Hammer (1917). These oxymoronic artworks seemed, almost spontaneously, to defy established parameters, undermine academic seriousness, and deny any compositional calculations. As these forms seemed to intimate, Arp wished to laugh "modern man out of his Renaissance-based hubris."

      Yet a strange thing occurs when one contrasts these reliefs of Arp, with their morphological affinity to Phillis Ideal's current paintings. Arp's once utterly irreverent sculptures now look restrained by comparison. Because of their execution in acrylic paint, these images demonstrate a fluidity of unchecked movement through the even less constrained forms that emerge from the paint's liquid substance. Suddenly, in comparison to Ideal's more mobile, brassy, and uninhibited paintings, the "formless" feeling once identified with Arp's sculptures now seems less salient, than do the clumsiness of artisanal wood-carving and the restrained sense of composition arising from it. In large part because of the very medium that inspired the organic fruit-like formations of his work, Arp's wooden reliefs now look distinctly "old master" when eyeballed alongside the paintings of Ideal, which nevertheless gained a good deal from their visual interaction with this once vanguard sculpture.

      Two of Ideal's accomplished and also Arpian paintings in the show, all of which were done in acrylic, are champion (18" x 16") and ogling (12" x 10"), each of which dates from 1999. With a to-and-fro scampering of pigment that features an overlapping figure/ground relationship that merely speeds up the image as a whole, champion has the look of an unleavened relief that is artfully disembodied to a degree that 3-D sculpture could never be. By the way that she has limited her palette in this case (and, in this sense, it is more subdued than any of the other paintings in the show), Ideal has provided us with a series of shifts in value that intertwine proximate hues with starkly contrasting tones. The series of oscillating interactions in the artwork are all the more particular to her paintings because of the way that the dominant color patches are literally superimposed as individual strips. Thus, these "pure" paintings involve brushwork plus a resourceful pouring technique that leads to paint layers that have appended much, as would different components of a wooden relief. To an arresting degree, Phillis Ideal has constructed these paintings as much as she has painted them. If Jean Arp strove for fluid wooden relief-sculpture, Ideal has succeeded at least partially in "sculpting" her paintings out of acrylic pigment.

      Another painting from the same period with similar attributes and somewhat different strengths is a work entitled overdrawn (12" x 10"). With a notably sinuous stream of black paint sitting smoothly atop the predominantly light gray and titanium white ground, this painting features a stretch of shining and opaque painting that snakes with almost effortless bends across the uneven surface of the canvas, so as to make any wooden relief-sculpture look materially immobilized by contrast. The extremity of these fluent turns, with their cartographic hints of a mapped river, embody expansive gestures with an unchecked confidence in their capacity to change direction, utterly unlike any sculpted mass and most cast-forms. Compared to the harried gestures of a Pollock, the shard-like traces of a mid-1950s de Kooning or the calligraphic compactness of a Kline, this painting by Phillis Ideal has the enviable sense of a gesture without side glances.

      Several other paintings in this show are slower in morphological gyrations, but more brash in coloration. They employ a carnivalesque Caribbean color interaction that is notable for its unaccented blare. Such is the case with several paintings: hospitality (12" x 10"), Garden (20" x 20"), and ogling (12" x 10"). In the first of these paintings there is a usage of high value orange in relation to a sunny yellow and small passages of somber foils that gives these images something like the force of a pictorial trumpet-blast. The second, Garden, is also a loud work with the look of a Latin bouquet that blossoms insistently. Among the key traits of this work is a pictorial tension that results as much from the "collaged" technical procedure as from the brute color interaction of the large passage of uninflected orange virtually dominating all else. At one and the same time, this bold expanse of hue seems to hover above, anchor, and circumscribe the other more somber passages of color that act as counterweights to its extroverted appeal.

      Yet another painting -- gong (20" x 20") -- depends on a less luminous, more somber palette, with a strikingly stark interplay between dark green and mauve-red. The net result is a degree of color intensity all out of proportion to the low value of the interactive passages. Moreover, the painting features a pullulating pictorial tension that is offset by the smooth central expanse of this odd, if complementary, duo. Here as elsewhere, then, there are extroverted paintings with a sassy palette that promise to reach out relief-like, only to sit with a slick opacity that suggests shadows in Phillis Ideal's paintings of "collaged" pigments. The aesthetic lesson is as timely as it is telling: only by cross-breeding with sculpted reliefs has it been possible to showcase some material traits that are peculiar to painting.

Albuquerque, New Mexico
January 2000

Dr. David Craven is Author and Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico. The five books he has authored are The New Concept of Art and Popular Culture in Nicaragua Since the Revolution in 1979 (1989); Poetics and Politics in the Art of Rudolf Baranik (1996); Diego Rivera as Epic Modernist (1997); Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (1999); and Insurgent Artists and Insurrectionary Movements in Latin America (1910-1990): The Future That Was (2001).

PHILLIS IDEAL: SECOND HAND BRUSH WORK

KATHLEEN WHITNEY

      Phillis Ideal is an abstractionist brat; she has deliberately taken the palette and profundities of Abstract Expressionism to Candyland. That palette is a shock: these paintings present an astonishing compilation of colors tending towards a queasy, cartoonish array of metallic silvers, fleshy peaches, various shades of aqua and other tones more appropriate on toys or machinery but rarely seen in a painting.

      Despite the presence of many over-painted layers, what may have been adjustments, revisions and recalibrations never read as corrections. The paintings don't appear uncomposed as much as they seem disheveled, as if they were made in a flash. This sense of speedy delivery has nothing to do with painterly mastery, or Ideal's capacity to make marks exactly as she intends them. Instead, Ideal paints like someone just discovering painting and this is what makes this body of work so intriguing. It is as if every mark laid down in them is important not because it was laid down in a fury of artistic creativity, but because, after scrutinizing each detail, Ideal determined they worked well enough together to function, to do the job.

      Phillis Ideal's paintings are a consequence of an extended process of testing and measuring; a determined effort to ascertain what is real, what can be counted on. This questioning does not involve the immediate components of painting, shape, support, surface, so much as an interrogation of the elements of painting, the marks, intervals etc. that construct and embody the painting as image. Her quest is not for definitions but for something more elusive: what makes meaning? what connects?

      Ideal is part of that generation of painters formed by Abstract Expressionism but keenly aware of the mordancy abstraction has fallen into. These painters have felt the need to shake the situation up, to add a fractured quality that produces a sense of the provisional and subjective. Her work presents an almost slapstick demonstration of how the abstractionist goes about composing and balancing the elements of color, form and line. In an entirely affectionate way, Ideal satirizes the practices and premises of "high" art.

      Ideal is also a profound lover of abstraction, seeking to recast it into another form without changing its non-objective appearance. By infusing a sense of the actual world into the work, she undoes the Ab ex-ers' emphasis on an "aesthetic sublime" which they believed could be imparted solely by formal relationships. The most striking aspect of her present body of work is how open it is in terms of its origins and influences. Despite its resolute post-modernity, it still succeeds in honoring a more traditional stance by not making the idea more important than its making. This is a serious art, one that presents extraordinary contrasts between image and pattern, construction and deconstruction. It is a brilliant synthesis of intellectual challenge, educated curiosity and emotional charge.

      Ideal's enterprise involves whipping the hard facts of painting into place; here is where Ideal's creativity, subtle humor and sneaky originality come into play. Her readily accessible work is at once theoretically sophisticated and self-explanatory. Unlike many contemporary painters, Ideal does not feel required to build self-consciousness of the parameters of painting into the work itself; instead, she chooses to immerse herself in the process. Ideal's enterprise depends heavily on collecting episodes of paint that are totally disparate and then assembling them in equally disjunctive sequences. The viewer must grapple with some of the most elemental problems of visual understanding in order to assimilate the experience of them.

      Her work is more like concrete poetry where the words on a page have both linguistic and visual meaning; the power of the work comes from the overlap of these two systems.

January 2000

Kathleen Whitney is a sculptor and a critic living in New Mexico. She writes for American Craft, New Art Examiner, Sculpture Magazine and World Sculpture News. She is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs.

PHILLIS IDEAL: ROSENBERG+KAUFMAN

MICHELLE FALKENSTEIN

      If a computer terminal melted with a particularly weird image on its screen, the lingering puddle might look like one of Phillis Ideal's new small-scale abstract paintings. Ideal combines dull putty grays and a muddy shade of mustard yellow with startling, inorganic hues right out of a Japanese comic book. Her reds look like nail polish, her pinks like cotton candy, her greens like cartoon frogs. This is work that exudes great humor and a surprising amount of power for its diminutive size.

      Ideal treats paint like a sculptural medium. She prepares her canvases with thin, scratchy layers of pigment, then pours acrylic onto them like pancake batter. Little craters, small flecks of dust, and even a tiny friut fly embedded into the surface of one pool of color attest to the length of time it must take for the paint to dry. Ideal also peels some of the large shapes from one painting and attaches them to others, Colorform-style, creating paint collages. The edges of covered-over shapes can be discerned under the surface of her work.

      The palette in Ooze, is designed to repel. The painting achieves great agitation in its disharmony. Here Ideal aligns magenta, hot pink, pale yellow, royal blue, and lots of melted-chocolate brown to create a work reminiscent of the psychedelic 1970s.

      But in Hospitality, viewers were welcomed by an abstract yellow breat with a perky pink nipple. The painting also features Tropicana orange and bubble-gum pink blobs spread over a thin background of army green. Ideal, a midcareer artist who lives in New York and Albuquerque, demonstrates a refreshing energy and playfulness.

ARTnews / May 2000