PHILLIP ALLEN | FLOORR

In your recent interview with James Kalm about your show at Miles McEnery Gallery in NY, you mentioned that you think about the mouth, tongue, and taste when it comes to colour and paint. Could you delve deeper into how these sensory experiences influence your approach to painting and colour choices?

I was listening to something last year about Michel Serres, and his ideas of the Second Tongue, the tongue having the dual purpose of speech production and taste facilitator. Painting has great transformative mobility as does taste and I was pondering these two shared common qualities. It’s a little synesthetic thing, but also perhaps allowing other sensory receptors to get in the act. The representations in my mind which focuses my painting aren’t sometimes best served through a lexicon of language based in sight, so playing with other possibilities are interesting to me. A well-used common example would be thinking about how “cooked” a painting is, rather than thinking whether it is finished or not.

Even though your paintings are very material-focused, they often give off an ethereal or cosmic vibe. How do you blend the physical aspects of paint with these almost dreamlike elements, and what do you want viewers to feel or think when they see this mix?

My paintings contain quite differing surfaces, the rougher and more undulated surfaces towards the edge with a smoother edited central surface. Both surfaces require a slightly deferent painterly approach. As I mentioned earlier, the motif or image in each painting is arrived at through a rather long process. I like the idea that you feel they are blended together because a lot of the time these two aspects feel very disparate. I want to avoid the edges being too frame-like and so leaking the illusional aspect of the painting into the impasto edges is a long task. Generally, it’s achieved through colour management and trying to impose a visual rhythm onto the painting using principles of perceptual gestalt - similarity, continuation, closure, proximity, figure/ground, and symmetry. 

I want the viewer to be presented with two paradoxical registers that are at once unified and separated, a bit like the rabbit / duck visual illusion.