Phillip John Velasco Gabriel
Eidolons
May 31 - July 13, 2019
In 2017, Phillip John Velasco Gabriel completed a painting (Untitled), which was shown in the spring of that year in a group exhibition titled “Lentils” at Ramiken in New York. On the canvas, measuring thirty six inches high by sixty inches long, Gabriel depicts a fragmented, genderless face, acutely rendered in oil on a small bright rectangular panel floating in a background of ultra fine sanded white matte paint, mottled with redactions. The face shimmers in and out of cohesion, as Gabriel pushes the painting past legibility into psychedelic dissolution.
In the two years that have passed since, Gabriel has finished a total of four new paintings, which comprise his first solo exhibition in New York, at Ramiken. Each painting is sixty inches high by forty two inches wide, and is comprised of two or more small, super-flat paintings spaced apart on raw linen. The linen is dirty and covered with stains, with the composition sketched out in pencil directly on the surface, guiding the eye to the unique symmetries that underpin the disembodied pictures. The end result is a painting as support structure for a constellation of harmonizing vignettes. Gabriel draws inspiration from the hieratic compositions of Catholic painting from the Renaissance, the geometric organization of high Modernism as well as the color field painting styles that evolved from it, and the mashup paint jobs of Jeepneys in the Phillipines. His subjects include agate landscapes, Chinese dream stones, Japanese anime, hypnotic Youtube videos, erotic cartoons, x-rays, thermal imaging, blue volcanic fire, and a haunting portrait of a social humanoid robot named Sophia. Each work is a collection of eidolons, ideals that refuse to coalesce, existing instead as evanescent phantoms of the human form, animated by an eternal mood. The hand, visually registered in each of the four works, serves to induce a waking dream.
Phillip John Velasco Gabriel was born in 1983 in Jacksonville, Florida. He lives and works in New York.