PHILLIP ALLEN 2024 by Miles McEnery Gallery

PHILLIP ALLEN

511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

I WOULD LIKE TO ADD By Phil King

I require some visual noise and “surface” interference to bring the board into “being.” This phase can take many weeks and sometimes years, as I overpaint old paintings. I like the phrase the “always already,” and even though I know this has specific philosophical connotations, for me it prompts the idea of never wanting to start anything but continually being in the middle of something. 1

— Phillip Allen. 3

I’ve written about Phillip Allen’s paintings before and am very happy to do so again. That’s because his is the kind of work that corrects our ideas, and I find myself involved in and compelled by a kind of difficult, maybe even impossible, continuum. It’s as if there’s an ongoing correspondence in which ideas—once inscribed with authority—become something like rafts shipwrecked on an iceberg drifting in a current, and I have to reexamine my footing as the ice inevitably melts. His paintings keep me off balance. In general, they invent a kind of outlandish creative foundation, and writing about them again involves a sense of reembarking. Or at least looking for a new raft. This, then, is an essay about what getting back on board Allen’s work feels like. Cobbled together and contingent, looking for footholds, this writing is not about what his paintings might generally mean. Rather, it is an attempt to find a new balance on unsettled ground—a shifting ground that has been excavated, that has been flooded with subterranean flows and waveforms, and that might be

impossible to figure out. I feel as if I’m subject to two impulses: I’m both setting sail into that impossibility and digging into it. I am at sea and exploring archeologically on land, for Allen’s painting has a somewhat nautical ability to provide unsteady support, and we are invited to dine at the captain’s table. Incongruously digging in. We are feasting in the middle of some sort of oceanic body—something that my mind finds remarkably elusive, in that we can’t pin down some origin or destination. Rocking and rolling out in the Gulf Stream, shipwrecked ship shape. Dream colors, ahoy!

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 afterhours 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. In my remembrance of TV static, images are absent. But Allen’s paintings feel full of elusive picturing. They are packed with partial content, and partial sensualities argue with partial objectivities in a world of differences. I think now that it was my sensation of waking up that nailed his work for me, rather than the sweeping roar of the now-obsolete imageless hiss of television static. There was a sense that I was reducing the paintings to a kind of forgotten memory, so as to be able to contain his work and hold it at a safe distance. This was very different from my current Phillip Allen-provoked reverie of swirling wavelets lapping and breaking over creaking shipwrecked boards slated to be lost as El Nino turns the flow of entire oceans around and tumbles climate change into crisis. This unanchored daydream pulls me out to the excavated psychedelic sea that particular paintings evoke and toward which they draw me.

But really, each of these paintings manages to escape generalizations. Each has enough power on its own to avoid representing any other painting. Bits of paint indicate wholly different realms. Each color is another language. So I regret trying to find an overall image, even if static is not an image, even if my effort was provoked by the paintings’ magical power. I want to delve more deeply into how these evocative “life rafts” actually work, and it feels like an endless task. Luckily, as a painter myself, I have been wrestling with such questions for most of my life. I have also struggled with the difficulties of doing so in my reading “practice.” Allen and I have connected over this interest. He describes his habit of listening to lectures and podcasts in the studio, while I awkwardly detail my endless, aimless, reading—all those second-hand books. We’re both incomplete in our own ways. He seems to be more of a worker than I am. I gravitate toward reading and writing, while he, a listener, gets on with painting. Maybe I’m the kind of contemplative daydreamer that his paintings speak to. Phil asks questions of me, and his paintings ask questions, too. In fact, his paintings are questions. I have to lie down to think about all of that. And what is a bed, other than a kind of raft? There, I have gotten to it. The overall sense is that these paintings are questions. And what is a question? Perhaps, it is a kind of device—or rather, part of a device. A while ago, Phil wrote to me and others: I’ve adapted the phrases “High memory painting, Low memory painting” from a scientific talk I was listening to. I like the phrases but am wondering what they could mean in relation to what we do. Is “high memory painting” that aspect of painting that requires the understanding of prior complex dogma? Is “low memory painting” that aspect of painting that focuses on immediacy and being in the “zone” or “flow”? How would you define these as-yet undefined phrases? 2

Henri Bergson (left) and Albert Einstein (right) conversation in Paris, 1922. Public Domain.

I, in response, went off on a late-night drift about Henri Bergson’s meeting with Albert Einstein in 1922 and how it damaged Bergson’s reputation for scientific expertise—and also the reputation of para-scientific intuitive philosophical speculation. From that point on, science reclaimed its philosophical authority as a measure, lost since the questioning of Euclidean certainties at the end of the nineteenth century. The root of Einstein’s dismissal was his view that Bergson misunderstood the physics-based nature of relative time and was trying to extrapolate relativity back into what Einstein saw as irrelevant Bergsonian metaphysics of time and memory. As I am romantically attached to the notion of cubist studio discussions between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and to the idea that poetic intuition briefly held great truth-telling authority in the years between 1908 and 1914, when the painting of Picasso and Braque broke through and flourished, Phillip Allen’s questions (both actually asked and latently hanging there as paintings), can feel like a cue to wax lyrical. Of course, the force of fact, of scientific rigor, interrupts such fabulations. Even in an art essay such as this, scientific common sense structures what can be said. Interrupts the saying of it. Gets me out of bed. Brings me to land—a land mapped out by arguing scientists. Phillip Allen’s paintings operate for me as interruption devices. They interrupt and interrogate. They peer review me. On the one hand, I have my reading, usually in French, of thinkers in the French philosophical tradition that perversely flourished

in the 1960s and ’70s out of canceled Bergson and his disregarded theories, a reading that plunges into the monologue flow of early Gilles Deleuze, for example. On the other, I have Allen’s difficult questions. These questions make me stop and look. Since they are questions that I can’t answer, they have a potential to drill down to the root. In the literary machine that Proust’s In Search of Lost Time constitutes, we are struck by the fact that all the parts are produced as asymmetrical sections, paths that suddenly come to an end, hermetically sealed boxes, non-communicating vessels, watertight compartments, in which there are gaps even between things that are contiguous, gaps that are affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges violently bent out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over. 3 7

In 1972 Deleuze interrupted his own philosophical monologue by writing The Anti-Oedipus, quoted above, with Félix Guattari, and the sense of that interruption became an affirmative force built into their shared thinking. Out of such broken flow, they developed an ability to juggle incomplete understandings, wedging things together into remarkably disorganized frameworks. Rafts surging down the middle of rivers. In their works, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and D.H. Lawrence wrestle along with absolutely everybody and everything else. Franz Kafka stands alongside Karl Marx. While dusty and probably as obsolete as television stations that shut down after a certain hour, they remain exciting stuff. This, then, is how Phillip Allen’s paintings work: I often come to them after traveling, and as I move slowly between paintings, that traveling sensation persists. Each painting contains its own horizon, literally piled up around its edge, each offers a look into a world divorced from the next—in fact, a look into another time. This separation breaks with any program, so to describe his work in general, to attempt to give voice to what it is about, to try to predict what will come — what will arrive — can’t actually work. And yet,consistency is weaved in as a working part of it all. Unpredictable consistency. Life.

In his study of James Joyce, the Italian semiologist Umberto Eco noted Joyce’s closeness to the old Irish Book of Kells: The page no longer stops before the gaze but assumes its own life. The reader no longer succeeds in choosing a reference point. There are no boundaries between animals, spirals, and entrelacs; everything mixes with everything. Nonetheless, figures or hints of figures emerge from the background, and the page tells a story, an inconceivable, unreal, abstract and, above all, fable-like story composed of protean characters whose identities are continuously disappearing. This medieval meanderta/e is the model of the labyrinth upon which Joyce constructed his book. 4

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. 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.) 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. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but it does not totalize them; it’s a unity of all of these particular parts but it does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately. 5 This then is my essay.

Notes 1. Phillip Allen, note to the author (2023). 2. Phillip Allen, email “questionnaire” to colleagues (2023). 3. Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 4. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, trans. Ellen Esrock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 5. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977)

Phil King is co-editor at Turps Magazine and is a painter who works in both the United Kingdom and France. He has written numerous catalogue essays on contemporary artists and he also translated The Studio of Giacometti by Jean Genet. He graduated from Bath Academy of Art in 1987 and received an MA from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 1993.

Low Memory (Compulsion Loops Version), 2023 Oil on panel 55 x 49 1/2 inches 139.7 x 125.7 cm

Low Memory (Curse of The So-Called Version), 2023 Oil on panel 56 x 49 inches 142.2 x 124.5 cm

Low Memory (Deep Thread Version), 2023 Oil on panel 79 x 72 inches 200.7 x 182.9 cm

Low Memory (Double Qualia Version), 2023 Oil on panel 40 x 33 inches 101.6 x 83.8 cm

Low Memory (Find Spot Version), 2023 Oil on panel 20 1/2 x 19 inches 52.1 x 48.3 cm

Low Memory (Indissoluble Trinity Liqua Version), 2023 Oil on panel 55 1/2 x 48 1/2 inches 141 x 123.2 cm

Low Memory (Mis Readings of The Obvious Version), 2023 Oil on panel 40 1/2 x 33 1/2 inches 102.9 x 85.1 cm

Low Memory (Redshift Nostalgia Version), 2023 Oil on panel 40 x 32 1/2 inches 101.6 x 82.6 cm

Low Memory (Ribbon Cut Glow Version), 2023 Oil on panel 56 x 49 inches 142.2 x 124.5 cm

Low Memory (Single 2nd Tear Version), 2023 Oil on panel 40 1/2 x 34 inches 102.9 x 86.4 cm

Low Memory (Strange Roads to Walk Version), 2023 Oil on panel 56 1/2 x 49 inches 143.5 x 124.5 cm

Low Memory (What’s in It for Me Version), 2023 Oil on panel 55 1/2 x 48 1/2 inches 141 x 123.2 cm

Title of Painting, 2018 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 59 inches 200 x 150 cm

PHILLIP ALLEN Born in London, United Kingdom in 1967 Lives and works in London, United Kingdom EDUCATION 1992 MFA, Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom 1990 BFA, Kingston University, London, United Kingdom SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2024 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2023 “Phillip Allen, Recent Works,” Luca Tommasi Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy

2017 “Deepdrippings,” Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland 2016 Dolph Projects, London, United Kingdom 2014 “Tonic for Choice,” The Approach, London, United Kingdom 2013 “Oxblood,” Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland 39 Mitchell Street, London, United Kingdom 2011 “Capital P,” The Approach, London, United Kingdom 2010 “...The Urgent Hang Around,” Bernier / Eliades Gallery, Athens, Greece 2009 Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland

2022 “Course Grain,” The Approach, London, United Kingdom

2008 “Sloppy Cuts No Ice,” The Approach W1, London, United Kingdom

2020 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2007 “Paintings & Drawings,” Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, Belgium

2019 “Deepdrippings,” The Approach, London, United Kingdom “Deepdrippings,” Luca Tommasi Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy

2006 MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom 2005 Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland “One Man Show,” Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, Belgium

2004 The Approach, London, United Kingdom 2003 Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, Belgium “Phillip Allen: Recent Paintings,” P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY 2002 The Approach, London, United Kingdom 1999 The Approach, London, United Kingdom GROUP EXHIBITIONS 38

2023 “8am in London, Midnight in LA,” Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London, United Kingdom 2021 Frestonian Gallery, London, United Kingdom 2020 “The Renaissance,” Luca Tommasi Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy 2019 “A RAW GARDEN,” Fitzrovia Gallery, London, United Kingdom “The Aerodrome,” Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom 2017 “20 Years,” The Approach, London, United Kingdom “Fully Awake,” blip blip blip, Leeds, United Kingdom

2016 “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” Charlie Smith, London, United Kingdom “Permeable Edge,” University of Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom 2015 “From a Fly on the Wall, to Fly in my Soup,” Galerie Dukan, Paris, France “Ghetto Anglaise,” Observer Building, Hastings, United Kingdom 2014 “Nanjing International Art Exhibition,” International Exhibition Centre, Nanjing, China “Head To Head: 4 Questions 8 Paintings,” Standpoint Gallery, London, United Kingdom 2012 “Courtship of the Peoples,” Simon Oldfield Gallery, London, United Kingdom “The Perfect Nude,” Charlie Smith, London, United Kingdom “The Perfect Nude,” Exeter Phoenix, Exeter, United Kingdom 2011 “From London,” Gallería Artnueve, Murcia, Spain “The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2011,” Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom 2010 Fabio Tiboni Arte Contemporanea, Bologna, Italy 2009 “Classified: Contemporary British Art,” Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom

“Kaleidoscopic Revolver,” Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; traveled to Han Ji Yun Contemporary Space, Beijing, China “Pattern Recognition,” City Gallery, Leicester, United Kingdom 2008 “M25: Around London” (curated by Barry Schwabsky), Centro Cultural Andratx, Mallorca, Spain 2007 “Layer Cake” (curated by Martin Holman), Fabio Tiboni Arte Contemporanea, Bologna, Italy “Hope and Despair” (curated by Bob Matthews), Cell Project Space, London, United Kingdom “Summer Group Show,” Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland 2006 “Archipeinture: Painters Build Architecture in London,” Camden Art Centre, London, United Kingdom and Le Plateau, Frac Île-de France, Paris, France “When Forms Become Attitude,” AR / Contemporary Art, Milan, Italy 2005 “British Art Show 6” (curated by Andrea Schlieker and Alex Farquharson), organized by the Hayward Gallery and Arts Council England; traveled to Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom; Castlefield Art Gallery, Manchester; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester; Cornerhouse, Manchester; The International 3, Manchester; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester; Urbis; The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester;Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham; New Art

Exchange, Nottingham;The Bonington Gallery, Nottingham; Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham; Nottingham Castle, Nottingham;Yard Gallery Nottingham; Arnolfini, Bristol; Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol; ROOM, Bristol; Royal West of England Academy, Bristol; Spike Island, Bristol; City Art Gallery, Prague;Vilnius, Lithuania;Tallinn, Estonia; and Krakow, Poland “Fantasy Island,” Metropole Galleries, Folkestone, United Kingdom 2004 “Stay Positive,” Marella Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy “Candyland Zoo,” Herbert Read Gallery, University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom “Reflections,” Atuatuca Art Festival, Tongeren, Belgium “Painting-04,” Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland 2003 “Christian Ward, Phillip Allen,Varda Caivano,” Millefiori Art Space, Athens, Greece “Allen, Cooper, McDevitt,” Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland “Post Flat: New Art from London,” Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA “The Drawing Show,” Keith Talent Gallery, London, United Kingdom 2002 “Another Shitty Day in Paradise,” Bart Wells Institute, London, United Kingdom “The Galleries Show: Contemporary Art in London,” Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom

1997 “Cardboard Box and Tape,” Norwich Gallery, Norwich School of Art and Design, Norwich, United Kingdom “Still Things,” The Approach, London, United Kingdom “Multiple Choice,” Cubitt Gallery, London, United Kingdom 1996 “Grin and Bear It,” Gasworks, London, United Kingdom SELECTED TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Programme leader at Turps Banana Studio Painting Programme, London, United Kingdom Tutor in painting at Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom Visiting lecturer at The Royal Academy, London, United Kingdom Visiting lecturer at Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom Visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, London, United Kingdom AWARDS 2010 Abbey Scholar, British School at Rome, Rome, Italy

SELECT PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Arts Council England, London, United Kingdom British Council, London, United Kingdom Government Art Collection, London, United Kingdom Tate Collection, London, United Kingdom

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

PHILLIP ALLEN 8 February – 23 March 2024 Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2024 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2023 Phil King Publications and Archival Associate Julia Schlank, New York, NY Photography by @BJDeakin_photography Dan Bradica, New York, NY Catalogue layout by Spevak Loeb, New York, NY ISBN: 979-8-3507-2660-2 Cover: Low Memory (Curse of The So-Called Version), (detail), 2023