Paperback, colour and black and white illustrations, 110 pages, W210mm x H280mm
The bright, colourful oil paintings in this book show portraits of men
and women, frequently nude representations borrowed from pornography,
occasionally also animals or contemporary sculptures.
They are all
based on the appropriation of found images which the artist takes from
magazines, the Internet or other mass media. The use of existing images
stored in the cultural memory of the society puts Phillips into the
tradition of the so-called "appropriation art" of the eighties. In some
pictures, the artist consciously reveals the technique on which his
photo-realistic manner of painting is based, leaving the grid necessary
for the proportional transfer of the model to the canvas exposed in
some places.
Philips invariably makes an issue of the blurring of the
borders between advertisement, lifestyle, pornography and fashion and
thus questions their ambivalent relationships.