Phillip Allen, "Rich History of Foul Ups" (2008). Oil on board, 83 x 72 in.

March 2009 Reviews

The Double Club

Prospect.1, theanyspacewhatever, The Art of Participation

The Order of Things

Keltie Ferris

Nayland Blake

Trenton Doyle Hancock

Mika Tajima

Anne Truitt

Hans-Peter Feldmann

Native Land, Stop Eject

Katja Strunz

Paul Nash Late Philanthropist's Collection Raises £16.5 Million for Charity

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Phillip Allen is a complex and perhaps also very British artist in that he reins in his, or rather painting’s, operatic tendencies. Framed top and bottom by horizontal bands composed of colorful impasto (thick cords, swirls, and turdlike extrusions of oil paint) Allen’s proto-landscapes—which in this exhibition of new paintings and works on paper further his language of semiabstract, often cartoonish shapes, shadows, and stylized, anthropomorphic letters that populate thinly painted, illusionistic spaces—are always presented in tandem with the base material of their manufacture. It’s not quite a case of showing us the gutter and the stars in the same picture; as becomes pronounced with the increased scale of some of these new works, however, Allen paints with both his medium’s limitations and possibilities in mind.

Like a good post-postmodernist, Allen wears his influences—early experiments in abstraction, the tentative, landscape-based extractions of Paul Nash, 1960s psychedelia—as a series of baggy but comfortable hand-me-downs and is conversationally fluent in the various languages at his disposal. Yet he’s also a strident modernist in that his format, to which he’s unwaveringly adhered for the past eight or so years, is meticulously mined for new seams of interest. Doubt and contradiction seep from some of his more glaring juxtapositions—earthy tones clashing with wildly synthetic hues—especially in Pinnacle Mind Hell (2008), whose central motif is a broken and unstable arch further compromised by inconsistent shading. The bigger picture, however, has to be seen as being one of faith. 

"Phillip Allen" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2009 Table of Contents.