Matt Phillips: An Indelible Touch

Review written by Katie Hector

Pre-pandemic traffic has returned to Los Angeles and if you happen to find yourself on Jefferson Boulevard take a moment to recenter and reset at The Landing where Remain in Light, a solo exhibition by Matt Phillips, is currently on view. The main gallery hosts fourteen paintings on linen generated within the last year that demonstrates the artist’s distinct approach to geometric abstraction. Welcoming, soothing, and intimate, this body of work reflects Phillips’s process-oriented meditation on touch, time, and rhythm. 

Phillips’s compositions are methodically fractured; a dynamic network of soft vectors that ricochet and reverberate within the rectangular confines of each painting. Relying upon an internal logic the artist excavates the picture plane with intersections and edges that coax forth fractals and geometric forms from within. Phillips’s Frecon-esque palette of phthalo blue, mauve, warm gray, chartreuse, rust, coral and teal applied in sections distinguish forms from their plotted framework and create a sense of rhythm and continuous movement. Evident within paintings like Coil and Cat’s Cradle, a rippling matrix of suture-like edges, where paint is built up or boundaries of colors meet, further complicate and fragment the compositions.

Diffused in natural light there exists a tranquil synergy between Phillips’s paintings and the exposed rafters, soft shadows, and architecture of the main gallery. Interspersed throughout the show works like Marianas, Mollusks (II), and Minneapolis anchor the exhibition. From a distance, they resemble backlit panes of stained glass. However, these orderly yet somehow animated paintings shift considerably upon closer inspection. A few feet away from the painting's surface their seemingly uniform geometric shapes dissolve into a meta pattern of pulsing brushstrokes. Suspended within a translucent mixture of pigment and silica the artist's fossilized touch is encoded onto each painting. Applied in a thin almost ubiquitous layer this membrane hovers like a veil atop the crisp white gessoed substrate which produces an illusion of density and depth from afar. Solid yet weightless, vibrant yet subtle, Phillips skillfully negotiates the tension between opposing formal qualities to construct paintings that are both uncanny and slow to reveal their genesis.

Reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase or Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, Phillips's graphic, fragmented forms imply movement and carry visages from 20th-century modernism. Wherein modernists aimed to convey the speed of industrialization, the buzz of electricity, or the breakdown of systems amidst times of war, Phillips's paintings respond to a world in the wake of a global pandemic. The collection of work is not racing towards a perceived finish line. Instead, it seems sustained by solitary introspection and a cosmic or generational understanding of time. Phillips’s markedly different approach to process and materiality feels refreshingly patient, delicate, elemental, and mysterious. At a time when the world is reopening and rebounding from various lockdowns, Phillips's paintings invite viewers to slow down, assess the present, and appreciate the significance of the encounter. Remain in Light will be on view at The Landing through July 3rd, 2021.

To find out more about Matt Philips check him out on Instagram or on his website.

You can also check out the gallery on Instagram or their website.