Phil Frost
Frost’s title for the exhibition, with its multiple meanings, alludes to a gestural build up of glyphic information. A counting, chanting, pulsing persistence of rhythm decoding an inner perception of interactive epiphany.
Frost’s visual language melds layers of flat white culturally indeterminate mask-like forms with bold typographical and fluid glyphic geometric and sinuous shapes that dance above vivid spectrums of painterly color, forming the long necked busts and repetitions of faces that are pronounced as his intuitive portraiture.
As his adolescence matured he moved, along with his younger sister and mother, by whom he was solely raised, to Cooperstown, NY for just over two years where an early fascination with baseball and in particular the position of pitching and the arabesque-like gesture made by a swinging bat was deepened. Often taking off on excursions to New York City to skateboard with friends, he was led to an awareness and depth of interest in graffiti and anonymous mark - making.
Early work with typography found him knocking out the negative space created by letterforms with white as a way to pop or form random patterns of shape to react against color. The fluid and sinuous patterns of white shapes that most often recently dominate his work came from a progressive evolution of the reduction of words that once, more often formed a nonsensical lingual chanting woven throughout the layering in his portraiture.
