Review: Philip Argent at Shoshana Wayne Gallery
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About 15 years ago, Philip Argent helped put L.A. painting in the spotlight by making Hard-Edge Abstraction look as sexy and progressive as it did in its heyday, when Karl Benjamin, Frederick Hammersley, John McLaughlin and their cohorts invented the hip, optimistic style in the 1950s. Argent brought the laser-sharp contours and screaming colors of their abstract compositions into the Digital Age, transforming organic shapes and pulsating patterns into supersaturated images fueled by computer technology and animated by the possibilities of instantaneous communication.
In eight new paintings and three small collages at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Argent takes things further, pushing his suave compositions beyond the breaking point while holding everything together. With a loaded combination of graceful, painterly aplomb and self-effacing humility that is flat-out thrilling, he paints the big bang as if it has just happened. Its shock waves seem about ready to hit us.
Each of the Santa Barbara-based, Las Vegas-educated and British-born artist’s acrylics on canvas contains more whiplash visual shifts than the best Cubist collage. Yet Argent’s oddly elegant pictures of cartoon clouds, neon-tinted pixels, gaseous atmospheres and swirling spills of primordial ooze avoid the rough cut-and-paste fragmentation of classic collage.
Each spacious, often vaporous and occasionally icy-hot concoction seems to be three or four paintings condensed so that they all occupy the same surface. At the same time, you can’t shake the feeling that as you are scanning one element of one hyper-refined painting — say, the gorgeous gradations of purple that pop up in various parts of “Untitled (Fascia #10)” — you’re missing what’s happening in other parts of the painting. The rest of the works seem to be cut from the same cloth or made from the same strand of DNA.
Think of Argent’s deliriously beautiful, subtly toxic paintings as the visual equivalent of computer viruses that scramble files in ways that make more sense than the originals. Such unpredictability can be maddening. But when the ghost in the machine works its magic, as it does in Argent’s expansive abstractions, you come face to face with the sublime without leaving everyday life behind.
-- David Pagel
Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
Above: ‘Untitled (Desert Robot),’ acrylic on canvas. Credit: Gene Ogami / Shoshana Wayne Gallery