Jordan rhoat and Brad Phillips – ULTRAMARINE BORING

East Hampton Shed
Jordan Rhoat and Brad Phillips

Jordan Rhoat and Brad Phillips both paint with a sense of humor and spirituality. These two artists are using the same tools to produce markedly different content, it is how each concern manifests within the practices which sets them apart. Rhoat effectively translates photography’s marrow into paint, consistently foregrounding objectivity via innocuous still lives. Phillips maintains rather opaque intentions, bumper sticker sentimentalism and here-and-nowness endure as constants.

Jordan Rhoat’s compositions edge on luminance, but always succumb to flatness. He foregrounds, producing cold images. Rhoat sources photos from local Craigslist postings. In this framework, the seller is moved to sell an object, not necessarily thinking about the creation of a compelling photograph. He is certainly working in opposition to iconography, seeking reference images that are consigned to a local aspect. With just plain water he pivots slightly, selecting an object from his own context rather than solely appropriating found images. He inputs the carton into a Morandi inspired setting in service of an explicit and didactic one-to-one gesture.

After selecting his subject, Rhoat strives to evoke image vitality by washing content out, and meditating on the picture plane. Flash photography is implicated within the canvas, outdated technologies and pixelation translated into paint. While he finds inspiration in the work of figures like Luc Tuymans, Rhoat’s paintings are markedly slow. He waters down his acrylics and amasses layers of paint to the degree at which they almost become watercolors, thus achieving a satisfactory wash. He engages with paintings as he does a certain meditation in which one is meant to stare at a wall for an extended period of time. With eyes unblinking, details tend to disintegrate and fade into whiteness. These paintings are thus diluted, caught in between clarity and erosion.

In Brad Phillips’s work, figuration and text operate as both narrative devices and artifacts of the artist’s psychological landscape. A parodic yin yang expresses the mass circulated imagery denoting balance, each swapped for a Snoopy. His proficiency as a writer comes to the fore in his painting practice weilding a predilection for syntax and typography in order to conceive funny poetics and a lighthearted reprieve from a culture slouching toward nihilism. 11/09/2021 borrows its typeface from the looming Chateau Marmont sign on Sunset Boulevard. In an untitled painting Phillips depicts a woman apparently hammering a rose to the wall. Across the back of her T-shirt the phrase “WHAT THE FUCK IS REALLY GOING ON” is rendered in Cooper Black and borrowed from a chance encounter at a nearby psych ward where he saw someone wearing a shirt with this phrase written in sharpie.

Material concerns are necessary, though Phillips’s main motivation is to visualize ideas and formalize concepts. His painting is informed by his writing practice; a lexicon concretized in oils and watercolors, formalism communicated in font and color. He mobilizes thoughts and writing in values and gestures. This is a mode of activating matter into concepts and then dimensional material; a transformation in stages. Revelations emerge over time, after the painting has been labored over.

Each artist endeavors to translate something particular onto the canvas - whether it be image or concept. Jordan Rhoat underscores and transcends banality by submitting to it fully. Brad Phillips is careful not to foist any hard and fast opinions via paint, his practice instead offers a lighthearted reprieve from the doom-laden news cycle.

-Reilly Davidson