| Phillis
Ideal: Recent Paintings Jonson
Gallery Tho
I have one just like that to home, deadleaf brown with quicksilver
appliqués, would wholly most applissiate a nice shiny sleekysilk out of
that slippering snake charmeuse. In
thinking about this piece of text that painter Phillis Ideal chose to
accompany her show of recent work, it occurred to me that this entire
century has been a Finnegan’s Wake by the funeral pyre of
painting. I mean, just when is this beast of artistic burden going to go
up in smoke, anyway? Well, it doesn’t seem about to slip into its
grave yet, painting rebirths itself at every turn and its manifold
progeny—whether abstract or representational—is incarnated into
images made with melted candy, for example, or plastics, resins,
prescription drugs, illegal substances. You never know what media may
have gone into the “slippering snake charmeuse” you are about to
hang on your wall, ceiling, or lay on your floor. The Albuquerque-based sculptor and writer Kathleen Whitney recently
referred to Ideal – who divides her time between Santa Fe and New York
– as an “abstractionist brat,” and this connotation of the artist
as saucy and sassy is apt. Whitney goes on to say, “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
doesn’t paint in the usual sense of the word. She pieces together her
paintings from layers of poured acrylic. She dances with her media, she
twists and turns in this process of pouring a form, sometimes adding an
occasional referential drip. A shape is allowed to dry and then it’s
placed with others on a flat canvas until the whole achieves the
multiple relationships that she is looking for. These paintings are
assembled more than they are painted, and Ideal uses restraint in her
compositions; she tempers her cherry reds arid vivid oranges, her bright
greens and royal blues with a deft sense of orchestration. These paintings seem as if they might have originated as plastic pieces
placed on a tray and roasted in the oven, but that is too slick an
analogy. What is spontaneous and fluid in Ideal’s process does not at
all represent a plasticity born of haphazardness. Her work oozes a
sophisticated knowingness about the evolution of contemporary painting.
Nods to Abstract Expressionism are there, also to minimalist reduction,
the fields of floating color, and the sassiness of Pop Art with her use
of home-shopping, Martha Stewart colors. One thing that is missing,
though, is the brushstroke. In
place of the brushstroke, and side by side with the biomorphic pours,
are marbleized areas of utmost delicacy and complexity. Sometimes a
dominant field, sometimes a barely visible area tucked between sexy
curves, these important chromatic subtleties—these visual connective
tissues—anchor the boldness and add another tributary of meaning.
Beside, below, or between the sleek metamorphoses of contemporary
painting, there exists the possibility of mystery and instances of rare
beauty that cannot be reduced or explained. The “slippering snake
charmeuse” incarnates in one more burst of bravado. And then there is
the company that she keeps. In
a separate space in Jonson Gallery hangs the work of four other women
who also work, or have worked, in New Mexico: Elaine de Kooning, Agnes
Martin, Agnes Pelton, and Florence Pierce. But it was Pelton’s
seldom-seen work that I had looked forward to most of all. Although
Pelton (1991-1961) had been included in the seminal California-based
show of 1987, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting from 1890 to
1985. she did not really emerge from obscurity until the middIe
1990s when her “rediscovery” was heralded in national art magazines.
Pelton had seemingly risen from the grave, wrapped in veils of her own
mystical light that she had painted over and over again in the early
decades of the last century. Pelton
was a true visionary—an artist with an exceptional ability to depict
the quality of her inner apparitions and states of being. Forms appear
in her work blended into seamless layers of a gauzy light as if the
light had been exhaled from her consciousness. The University of New
Mexico is fortunate to own several outstanding works—The Voice, Mount
of Flame, Wells of Jade, and White Fire. These images seem less painted
than “airbrushed” directly from Pelton’s altered states onto the
canvas. Her work is undeniably forged in the flames of a spiritual heat
and the resulting visions rise like silver bells in the night. |