Richard Phillips: Point of Purchase

An artist who is unafraid of embracing the commercial, Richard Phillips’ work is a veritable homage to the banal. His latest exhibition, a survey of prints, multiples, media interventions and retail projects from 1999-2010, opens on Saturday in East Hampton. In a famous quote, Phillips stated "my pictures involve a kind of wasted beauty," and an aura of pointlessness does resonate throughout the showcase of image after image of soft porn stars and nameless models in glossy hyper-real detail. The subjects fix you with lacklustre stares, breasts bare, seeking to arouse without interest, to titillate without enigma. Yet they compel. There is a disparity of scale with the planes of the face drawn out in painstaking detail, eyelashes flickering like spiders legs and lips shimmering thickly with lacquer – details that are thrust into sharper relief via the baldly neutral background. The women don’t so much burst from the canvas as throb coolly, filled with energy that their component parts do not deserve; interesting despite their overt beauty and sexuality, rather than because of it.

Yet Richard Phillips is an original breed of artist. Point of Purchase, the knowing title of the exhibition, clearly references his appreciation of the world of commerciality in all its forms, detailing the collaborations with brands, magazines and boutiques, from the striking Lacoste polo shirts designed in conjunction with Visionaire magazine to the work for MAC, when he used the company’s products to colour the eyes, lips and cheeks of his painting Der Bodensee. Never shying away from embracing the lowest echelons of celebrity culture, this latest show also features his own line up of modern day icons. Eschewing the glitterati to be found on the Hollywood walk of fame, these include those more likely to be found within the pages of gossip magazines, such as Robert Pattinson and Taylor Momsen. Interestingly, it is this complete lack of artistic snobbery that imbues Phillips’ work with its power and humanity. His works do not judge, they relish and appreciate. His muse is both otherworldly and overwhelmingly real, a paradox that is best demonstrated in his entry to the 2011 Venice Biennale: an intensely human video portrait of the beleaguered actress Lindsay Lohan. A 98 second film, shot in his customary palette of sun-bleached shimmers, this unlikely icon of modern times is shown at once as a sixties style beach goddess, and dwarfed and manipulated by her own fame.

Richard Phillips: Point of Purchase opens on Saturday July, 162001 at John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller and runs until August 8, 2011.

Text by Tish Wrigley