ARTISTS
JOHN PHILLIPS
SELECTED PRESS
The Chicago Tribune, March 2008
The Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery is back in its old space, which has been newly configured and renamed (for its director all along) the Tony Wight Gallery. To mark this rechristening is a group of eight new paintings by John Phillips, who more than any other Chicago-area artist has kept hard-edged abstraction fresh by making it intelligent but also bouncy and fun.
"Joey," one of the smaller and older pieces (from 2006), has a seductive surface of wax tempering the humor of three cropped ovals that are disposed to suggest an extreme close-up of a cartoon face. Thereafter, the wax drops out and the works get much larger. I've said before that I miss the refinement of Phillips' earlier surfaces, and I still do, though here, in gray oval-and-stripe pieces, the coolness of palette again seems to check rumbustiousness, acting as a balancing agent.
Along with jazzy disc paintings, sometimes playfully titled, is one that borders on that short-lived phenomenon of the 1960s, Op Art. Called "Hey Joe (Albers)," the work recalls brilliantly colored geometric canvases by the German artist, mathematician and educator. But it does so by bringing into play the ubiquitous Chicago "wiggly line" that here gives a tremulousness like colors in an offset lithograph being out of register. This vibration, combined with rectangles arranged in the work's center to suggest a face, give an optical thrill buoyed by high spirits that is sometimes aimed for in contemporary abstraction but most often missed.
Alan Artner