PHILLIP ALLEN

"I previously felt Allen’s paintings embodied a sensation of static, a static that was always there. It was old-fashioned; it evoked memories of dropping off to sleep watching television and waking to the sight and sound of unprogrammed after-hours fuzz. It’s an experience from a bygone era; like an archeologist I dug up something from a past life. But, I reflected afterward, it doesn’t really capture the way Allen’s paintings embody a kind of revealed 'now.' While my television observation was a useful characterization of the sense that some sort of subtle old technology resides within his paintings, it was an idea or image that didn’t cover the sensuous bursting into life sensation that truly defines Phillip Allen’s work. Each painting has a real sense of 'arrival.' The paintings are outlandish, but they feel like home. A curtain is drawn back, and the play for today begins."

- Phil King in "I Would Like to Add"

"It’s not that we read Phillip Allen’s paintings as pages but that seeing them together puts us into a woven realm whose threads have been somehow lost. Writing an essay on them implies an ability to pick up loose ends and tie them into some coherent argument. But now, as a somewhat experienced interlocutor of both Allen himself and his work, I find that his questions are the thing that ties his mindscapes together. And what are questions but partial objects? In his objects, he combines material tactility, offered up to be looked at, with actual specific and directed questions. He embodies his questions in paint. When I think of one of his paintings, I tend to sit up and pay attention. They touch a nerve."

- Phil King in "I Would Like to Add"

"So, Phillip Allen’s paintings embody different questions of memory and time. They are devices that weave his interest in 'high level dogma' into the interruptive immediacy of his painting. (He apparently has a studio soundtrack of things like game theories, podcasting, and all those grinding apocalyptic news stories—those grim scientific climate predictions that are inevitably coming to pass.)"

- Phil King in "I Would Like to Add"

"Phillip Allen’s paintings are question devices that we can touch but never really answer. Touch is a curious sensation, and the kind of visual touch that Allen deploys is more curious still. There are questions like the scraped off paint that roughly frames the rhythms of interior visions, visions that are now sacrificed to our searching gazes: awake gazes looking for answers to read, edgy gazes in search of lost forms, gazes interrupted. Gazes only able to add more questions. Gazes that invade the potential in his paintings. Electric gazes waiting helplessly to be scraped off. Gazes swept away by partial rhythms born in what he calls his 'find spot.' Gazes interrogated by what he finds. Gazes whose technocratic immediacy these paintings question."

- Phil King in "I Would Like to Add"