Phillip Allen @ The Approach

New material is demanded from the comedian.
Old material is demanded from the musician.
But what exactly are the demands made of the painter?
On their “The Approach gallery is proud to present Phillip Allen’s 5th solo London exhibition”.
Painting is more akin to a joke; something that gets told again and again, by newer and newer people enjoying something old which is new to them thus new to the world. Because a joke told by a new mouth is a new joke, because, as we know, it is no longer about the joke it is all about……………………… the timing.
I know Phil Allen, I have spent endless hours in a studio with him while he paints and I will let you in on a secret about him; he is paranoid that painting is hated. Personally I enjoy hearing Phil’s neurosis on the subject, it excites me, makes me wish I was a painter with a capital P.
Because… As we have been told it over and over again by the priests and undertakers of the art world who have put coins over the eyes of the corpse of painting, declared it dead while maintaining faith in the vitality of film, video, performance lectures. Well that’s just plain stupid and naïve. Still thinking that because it is not the old thing but the “new thing” and that being the “new thing” means it has life. But the way I see it is: it is all fucked. By enacting the dead/alive binary what you are doing is a subterfuge, trying to keep the machine alive by the ritual declaration of death of painting to keep “Junk Assemblage” alive by tying it to the old binary. When in fact the binary in itself is redundant and the machine is long broken.
The game is up, so let me not pretend like the fools over there who in their press releases talk of artistic “exploring and investigating” and always tell of the artist’s “obsession” with such and such obscurity. When we know that the only obsession artists have these days is Googling themselves. Painters with a capital P are the ones on the only path outside of the binary; they are like the zombie (a third position creature, the UN-REANIMATED). The Zombie is who, as artists, we should all be identifying with not those still clinging to life or wishing for death like the junk/scatter, film, photo, performance, sound, etc crowd. The P painter occupies the un-re-animated position, and so like the zombie forever walking the world looking for the brains of the living to eat, to remove the ration, the logical and the theoretical. They go to the studio every day, do this thing unquestioning and will repeat forever. There is nothing more to do in the post-infected landscape, thanks Marcel. The endgame has been played but the end never comes, and never will come. P-painters know and are right in knowing that the apocalypse is the wait for the apocalypse because the apocalypse never comes…. ever.
Sorry.
The views expressed in this press release do not necessarily reflect the views of Phil Allen or the Approach Gallery or any employee of the Approach Gallery.
Alastair MacKinven

Fade Away - Painting show at Transition Gallery

FADE AWAY
http://www.transitiongallery.co.uk/htmlpages/Fade_Away/hm.html

Lovejoyvian,
Phillip Allen

Diluvial Geology,
Nathan Barlex

Fade Away is the first in an ongoing series of exhibitions at Transition with different guest curators focusing on the diversity of contemporary painting and exploring the ways in which artists are engaged with it.


Fade Away, which is curated by Alli Sharma, with an accompanying text by Barry Schwabsky, features paintings that oscillate between representation and abstraction. With widely diverse references and subject matter, they all share a strong material presence. Whatever the creative enquiry, they make you think about paint and the act of painting.

Some of the Fade Away artists work directly from the perceptible world; others use the representational as a point of departure into the abstract, or conversely, explore the abstract, which reveals itself as subject.  The dialogue between surface and illusion, representation and abstraction performs a paradoxical balancing act where surfaces are brushed, scored, erased, layered, revealed, dripped and collapsed. Compositions teeter on the verge of illegibility where images emerge and fade away. 

Blue Boy, Paul Housely

Marcus Harvey - Tattoo

Marcus Harvey - Tattoo at The Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond St
http://www.fascontemporary.com/

Island Monkeys
“Who wants to live on a fucking rainy rock in the middle of the ocean?”
A question John Lydon employs to justify residing between sunny L.A. and the lush Italian countryside.
A journalist questions his buttery loyalties as ‘having his cake and eating it’: wanting to sit in judgement of classridden,
dysfunctional consumerist society but also celebrate the contradictory way British culture welcomes and absorbs his diatribes. I sympathise.
I’m trying to create an image of this land and my own conflicting middle place. I suppose the work has
something to do with the glory of the past, the astonishing accomplishments of our maritime history, our pugnacious nature and the not-so-distant accolades of sporting triumphs. You can’t be indi!erent to the
brutality of colonialism but I am not interested in taking ironic swipes with this work.
As the pendulum of world power grinds eastwards we are, or at least I am, properly feeling the naked coldness of this rock, shorn of influence and wondering if any of the genius of place can create a new sense of pride and security for the future. Not questions an artist should ask, really.
With recent bodies of work, I’ve been drawn towards personalities who have been precipitated by and influenced the texture of our air. Some alive, some dead, some long-time dead. In doing so, I’ve been upbraided by fellow artists for being too
obvious and too direct, not timeless or ambiguous enough to make great art. I broadly concur with this. However, I can’t help being drawn to making
portraits of influential figures, partly because when doing this, art seems to have a function other than cannibalism, the tiresome ‘art’ as the subject of ‘art’.
Here, I’ve tried to bed down these figures into a
cast of characters and motifs; an ensemble. I’ve found myself much more absorbed by
museum exhibits than contemporary art galleries in the past few years, examining coins, statues,
figureheads from sailing ships, ‘Punch and Judy’ puppets... This has led to the ceramics, the clay
seems to o!er enough resistance to the pummelling I bring to my practice. In my earlier paintings, I’ve
employed eccentric devices to check the rather unbalanced rage that comes with my attack on the
stu! I’m fixing to the image. In these sculptures,I’ve found a balance of manhandling and building
that can be arrested at a crucial point then fired. The application of colour then becomes more
pleasurable because it can’t so easily jeopardise the image. Here is a temporary sanctuary for my
masculinity.