Philip Allen is a highly intelligent painter, and it’s hard to stop thinking about what his paintings mean and just look at them. This was his second solo show in New York. His last was highly praised, and critics compared him with just about everybody. He does drag his vision through the history of painting: there’s Matisse, there’s Picasso—all the great moderns seem to be accomplices in this rich and wonderful work. Art is how he looks at life.
Allen’s painting is complexity itself. Sun Two Moons East River Farm is a cluttered mix of roller-coaster treads, aqueducts spilling water, frames running out of the picture and smaller internal paintings—plus gnomic triangles and bejeweled tentacles darting into the foreground and then vanishing back into interconnected system. The effect is not merely busy but impacted.
In Reward, a sort of cheerful apocalypse told by a very dry brush, water is the primary theme. A cascading jamboree loaded with cups and horns, the picture escapes sentimentality by its crude rendering. Again the canvas Is packed full, and the plethora of detail is thoroughly active. A more expressionistically rendered untitled painting in wide bright swaths of pigment resonates with the handsome symbology of Marsden Hartley or Arthur Dove.
Allen’s subject here is intriguingly ambiguous: few red hearts and assorted vulvae or womblike structures hang along the edges of the work, while the painting goes deep and black in its center.
Danae, the most literary painting in the show, has a kitschy quality. It’s a bit of a still life with a surface rich in scrolls, marks, decorations. inscriptions—even a page of music. Stylistically, it reminded me of the early theater pieces of Richard Foreman—filled with specifics yet utterly mysterious. Art is a game, both artists seem to say. Choosing comedy tragedy, Allen makes the ludicrous beautiful. The painter—like Zeus, who got the girl in the Danae legend—gets to laugh.
—Eileen Myles
