Phil Frost
Self-taught, Frost defines his personal style as “intuitive perceptive portraiture”. In the artist’s own words: “My work is a means to chart and define an interpretation of sensorial experience through perception and the building up of a consequential visual gesture, which amounts to an accumulation of physical trace as passage interwoven through the layers of pictorial depth”.
In the 1990s he was part of the alternative New York graffiti movement and was influenced by the music scene of the period, creating images of immense expressive power that are immediately recognizable through the way they juxtapose white patterns, such as letters and symbols, on different levels.
Lineage of Continuum, 2011 - 2018
His characteristic figures have elongated faces and stylized necks that recall totems and tribal masks and are the formal elements that establish the prinicipal axes of his complex compositions. Within the superimposed planes, viewers can make out geometric patterns—including circles of various sizes, positive and negative, stars, triangles, hearts—that repeat endlessly to create an articulated structure for both the bright colours of the base and contrasting elements of light and shade, as well as incorporating all kinds of salvaged and recontextualized objects—including boxes, bottles, ladders, baseball bats, helmets, toy cars, brushes, locks, buttons, leaves, feathers, metal plates, numbers and letters.
Lapsed Stack Of Weighted Irony, 2013 - 2017 (left) and Isolated Bust of Perceptive Importance, 2005 - 2013 (right)
Ellipse of Passage includes several monumental works, one of them a diptych previously on show—in unfinished form—in Magnetic Shift, the exhibition at the Corning Tower in Albany mentioned above, as part of Frost’s work in progress. The idea of entry to another dimension of perception, indicated in the current exhibition’s title, is present in important earlier works such as Entrance to Perception Gate (2003 - 2014) or the emblematic Consequential Passage of Accumulative Experience in Perceptive Realm (2002 – 2014). Through their imposing size, some of the pieces on show here invite us to cross to the other side of the work’s surface and pass into the artist’s personal and unique universe.
