Juxtapoz Magazine – Pat Phillips and the Strange Suburb
“I often use painting as a way to reflect,” Pat Phillips claimed on the eve of his new solo display at M+B Gallery in Los Angeles. “A way to unpack memories, previous traumas, and experiences that seemed very regular by 90’s/early 2000’s standards. Mythologies we repeated…games we played…phrases we spoke…even our associations. As I get older, I assume about these gatherings. Regularly embellished or glossed over…how that celebration was so dope!, but a person dropped the N-bomb. In some cases as a signifies of survival this meant laughing it off to display everyone you weren’t “a pussy.” Often that intended punching an individual in the confront… Peculiar Suburb is a visible diary of these lived experiences.”
In a current interview with Juxtapoz this earlier Winter, Pat gave an overview of America, via activities in the South and Northeast. Several of all those experieces are felt in his paintings, and we commented at the time as to how Pat was like a documentarian, just not in a literal feeling. With Strange Suburb, he packs a punch, nearly a more literal hostility. But a poetic and flexible hostility, anything timeless in phrases of being familiar with America but also a misunderstanding by some of the place we are at these days. Pat is finding proper to it. This function shows the spirit of American portray in the vein of Guston and Marshall where by politics and social triggers can be spoken of and to with figuration and pretty much collaging of tips. There are familiar faces in the paintings, but initially put and in a new context.
“With my current do the job, of course, the cartoons are literal in the sense that they are taken from pop tradition, but the characters’ roles just take on a extra subversive goal,” Phillips instructed me previous year. “It’s possible that’s me staying stuck indoors for two years and indulging in my childhood by way of streaming solutions and bidding on previous comedian books, haha!” But the stop of consequence are paintings with a function, a torpedo by means of our cultural landscape and some of Pat’s strongest works to day. —Evan Pricco
