KATTERFELTO (STUDIO VERSION) 2004
Phillip Allen (1967 – )
Details
- Dimension
- 50 X 71 CM
- Media
- OIL ON BOARD
- Accession number
- P7873
Summary
Phillip Allen’s paintings are borne out of a continuous practice of sketching. Working on on a small scale, on A5 paper, using felt pens, the sketches chart the inception and development of his abstract forms and arrangements. Typically, variations of particular formal arrangements will be pursued through a vast number of sketches, which are then developed in small series of paintings on board of differing sizes. The scale and media of the paintings identifies them as gallery-based work, and Allen speaks about the “paradox of painting” as the struggle played out within the traditional confines of the rectangular canvas. He likens the activity of painting to the Escher drawing of a staircase, which defies visual logic by playing with perspective so that staircases interlock in physically impossible ways. It is a hermetically closed field of endeavour, emphatically non-representational, which perpetually turns about itself to find new paths to explore.
The unrestrained enjoyment of paint as a material is at odds equally with the “cool” of much recent British painting, and with the almost phsychaedelic, geometric vistas which it frames. While with Katterfelto the mind strains to detect some reference to the outside world from which the structure might be abstracted – standing at the top of the Eiffel Tower and looking down through the interlacing metal struts, perhaps, or some infinitesimally magnified detail of DNA structure. Katterfelto, should you be wondering, was an itinerant performer, famous for a brief moment throughout Europe in the late 18th century. Essentially a quack doctor, who presented demonstrations of early microscopy and electricity as pseudo-magical phenoma, Gustavus Katterfelto was an illusionist who harnessed a small amount of science to spectacular effect. With Allen’s paintings, perceptual tension lies between the actual relief of the impastoed “frame” and the illusory depth, but actual flatness of the central area of the canvas, Both the handling of the paint, and the shallow perspectival depth of the motifs of these hallucinatory dream-scapes, bounce the viewer back to the flat surface of the canvas, confounded.
While there is clearly no external reference in Allen’s paintings, it would be redundant to think about his practice in terms of the purism which characterised abstraction in the early twentieth century. Purity, in Mondrian’s terms, was to be achieved through an absolute purging of all corporeality from his paintings. He used the term “illusion” to denote the way in which his planes of colour played as active a role in the composition as the black lines of the grid. Unlike Malevich’s Suprematism, in which white suggests a space in which pure forms are suspended, Mondrian’s planes of white give the illusion of having the same value as all other parts of the painting. The moral and philosophical climate which supported the search for absolutes, for purity and ideal forms in art, and in social life decayed as rapidly as the immaculate white surfaces of it’s architecture. Today’s glass and curtain-wall towers and malls have a high gloss surface which reflects the viewer back on themself, and denies vulnerability to time.
Supernova, British Council, London 2005
Glossary
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Abstraction
To abstract means to remove, and in the art sense it means that artist has removed or withheld references to an object, landscape or figure to produce a simplified or schematic work. This method of creating art has led to many critical theories; some theorists considered this the purest form of art: art for art’s sake. Unconcerned as it is with materiality, abstraction is often considered as representing the spiritual.
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Canvas
A piece of cloth woven from flax, hemp or cotton fibres. The word has generally come to refer to any piece of firm, loosely woven fabric used to paint on. Its surface is typically prepared for painting by priming with a ground.
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Drawing
The depiction of shapes and forms on a flat surface chiefly by means of lines although colour and shading may also be included. Materials most commonly used are pencil, ink, crayon, charcoal, chalk and pastel, although other materials, including paint, can be used in combination.
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Metal
Metal is a medium frequently used by artists to make art works - from sculpture to printmaking. Surfaces can display an array of colours and textures, and are capable of being polished to a high gloss; metal can be melted, cast, or fused, hammered into thin sheets, or drawn into wire.
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Painting
Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.