Image: Ricky Powell, 2001
"...His paintings and altarlike sculptures exude extreme sophistication, specifically a confidant fusion of graffiti, modern art, modern design and the primitive art that influenced so many facets of modernism. The results are exuberantly decorative and fierce..."
Roberta Smith, The New York Times, June 2001
Phil Frost Interview
"Rooted in sensation and perception, environment, memory, and imagination, the conceit of his paintings are peppered with totemic influences, tumultuous emotion, and a meditative and calculated layering process, gesture, and achitecture. Evidenced by his sense of light and gestural ideograms, Frost shares with Abstract Expressionism artists the aim to make energy and motion visible."
Fabienne S. Powell, curator
Image: Benjamin Deberdt, San Francisco, 1998
"If we must frame Frost's fanciful vision as that in musical metaphor, the operative word would probably be improvisation. Never quite sure where he's going, when he's done getting there, or exactly the nature of the destination upon arrival, and yet without so much as a trace of the haphazard naivety one might expect from a self - taught painter who began painting at 18 (...). Phil Frost invests just enough residual traces of his epic creative process to leave a breadcrumb arc of the journey itself. Far from the Duchampian conceit or aestheticism's object trouvé, the anatomy of found objects upon which he builds his totemic temples, and objects of sacrifice and praise, is forged from the moment-by-moment blasts of improvisatory inspiration. They come quite physically as he finds them, embarking on his journey as an itinerant wanderer through the urban detritus of disuse, but in the end charting a more personal typography".
Snap Bapp Bop boho ranting rhapsodica: The Painting Distinctions of Phil Frost as Interpreted by Carlo McCormick
