ARTISTS
JOHN PHILLIPS
SELECTED PRESS
No fooling: Wight Gallery re-opens on a 'serious' note, Chicago Sun-Times, 2008
During a visit to the newly renamed Tony Wight Gallery last week, I asked the eponymous owner why he recently changed his West Loop space's title from its quirky former moniker, Bodybuilder & Sportsman. "I've been running it for years and I guess I thought it was time to take responsibility," Wight told me with a slightly sheepish look. "And I think some people thought the old name was kind of a joke. I was a little worried about being taken seriously."
I'm not sure the worry was entirely justified -- Wight's reputation as one of the city's best younger gallerists is secure -- but I do understand the balancing act that many in the Chicago art scene are always trying to pull off: wanting to be taken seriously even as they don't want to be seen as taking themselves too seriously.
A case in point is Chicago artist John Phillips, whose new oil paintings are the focus of the gallery's current show (which also includes an installation by Ken Fandell, who divides his time between the Windy City and Brooklyn). Phillips' experiments with intense color and spatial relationships recall the work of Jules Olitski and, in some cases, the op-art of Joseph Albers and others; one 2007 piece is actually called "Hey Joe (Albers)." (Another painting, 2007's "Jill," feels like the love child of Olitski and Albers, with the hovering spheres of the former interrupting and yet complementing the radiating patterns of the latter.)
But where Olitski and the op-artists were often ostentatiously profound, Phillips' work is playful and self-effacing, his titles winking and elfin in the tradition of the Imagists, especially Karl Wirsum and Jim Nutt. An elegant essay in juxtaposed stripes and spheres, which certain other artists would try to convince us conjures the essence of the universe, instead takes itself down a peg or two with the title "My Daddy Drives a UFO" (2008). And Phillips' most gorgeous and Olitski-like painting in the show is "Untitled (Puppy)" (2006), whose title obfuscates as much as it reveals.
The interesting thing about all this kidding around is the limited success it has in deflecting our attention from how expertly made these canvases are. There's a tactile lushness to the application of the paint, and an insistent crispness to the borders between foreground shapes and background fields, that betray the artist's almost obsessive attention to detail and his underlying steadiness of purpose. For all the fun he's having, Phillips is stone cold dead serious.
So is Fandell, though with considerably less apology and disguise. The title of his 10-minute animated video loop "The Most Important Picture Ever" (2008) sounds ironic, but it isn't; it's part of a multi-part contemplation of the Hubble Telescope's deep-space imaging of the visible universe. To a glowering electronic soundtrack, the space picture -- galaxies, stars and other celestial bodies floating in the cosmos -- gives way to a gradually coalescing image of what might be a landmass or a leaf on a tree, which then disintegrates: macro to micro and back again, the essence of the universe, all kidding aside.
Kevin Nance