The Fame Monsters
With his vivid, technicolor portraits of Robert Pattinson, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, and others, painter Richard Phillips explores the dark recesses of the red carpet moment.
In an age when nearly every major fashion house has a “celebrity services director” pushing photos of starlets and leading men wearing its latest pieces in front of step-and-repeats that further promote the brand, there may be no timelier artist than New York City–based painter Richard Phillips. Over the past decade Phillips has staked out a unique position in the white-hot center of the modern pop-culture nexus where film, music, fine art, and fashion constantly intersect at an endless stream of posh parties and openings. As such, his candy-hued, hyperrealistic portraits (shown at Gagosian Gallery in New York and White Cube in London) have insinuated themselves into a M.A.C campaign and the much-lauded, if fictional, Bass art collection on Gossip Girl. Meanwhile, in true Warholian fashion (remember Andy in that episode of Love Boat?), Phillips himself made a cameo in the season two of the teen drama, and another on Bravo’s Work of Art. Now he’s upping the ante with Most Wanted, a series of 10 portraits of the hottest young celebrities—from Leo DiCaprio and Robert Pattinson to the Taylors (Swift and Momsen), all rendered from those aforementioned red carpet images—opening at White Cube on January 28.
The series began as an assignment for pastels of five leading men for V Man in the summer of 2009. “It’s hard to imagine a pastel having any consequence into today’s age, but when my pastel of Robert Pattinson went out into the media during Miami Art Basel, it was at the same time of the New Moon premiere and it went out onto the Internet like crazy. All the New Moon websites and blogs were going nuts; a drawing, an artwork of their star was an amazing thing. It gave me a sense that there was a real desire to see this work,” Phillips said during a recent studio visit, comparing the settings behind these “completely and deliberately synthesized experiences” to “the grain alcohol of media—you take all these rotten potatoes and put it through copper tubing and it’s going to come out a clear liquid.”
At his West Chelsea studio, Phillips had contests with his assistants to find the most emblematic image of these stars, which were later transferred to oversize canvasses via silkscreen. Then those images were negated with Phillips’ soft but vibrant oil renderings, punctuated by halos that pay homage to the late ’70s, early ’80s Interview covers of Richard Bernstein. “I had made one painting in 1998 of Rob Lowe called ‘Portrait of God,’ which was in the first PS1 Greater New York show, and that painting had more of a modest halo around it,” says Phillips. “So with these I just looked at Bernstein’s greatest hits, like the Paloma Picasso and the like, and found the styles of halos that went best with each of these portraits.”
Though he worships in the house of hyperrealism, Phillips agree that his new paintings seem to fall under the umbrella of what you might call hyper-fakism. “The notion of dire exclusion is a subtext for the show. It’s about everything that’s not there. The homogeneity of it. The fact that they all look the same,” he says of the exceedingly polished works that reveal a dark, crude undertone when viewed from various angles. That notion will be hammered home in the catalog with a short story by James Frey about a fictional celebrity couple pushed to extremes by the prison of their own fame.
“It’s probably the most disturbing show I’ve ever done, and there’s no pornography or political emblems in it,” adds Phillips, referring to two hallmarks of his previous work. “The longer you sit with it, the truly diabolical nature, the real horror of it comes up. The idea of being caught up in ritualized consumption and these stars aren’t offering any alternative to it—they’re reinforcing it.”
Even so, you can’t help but wonder if fashion’s biggest art connoisseurs—Marc Jacobs, Karl Lagerfeld, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault—won’t be tempted to pick up the works invoking their respective houses. Here the artist offers some insight into an exclusive first look at his subversive most-wanted list.
Kristen Stewart, 2010
“I think the easiest one right off the bat was Kristen because of her relationship with Pattinson; plus, New Moon and Twilight were such a success. And just at that time she was hitting it big with The Runaways with Dakota Fanning. The Runaways was kind of a great but wasted opportunity, because the film was horribly directed and terribly shot, but their performances isolated from that were great.”
Robert Pattinson, 2009
“The demand for getting things right with Pattinson—getting the lips right, the beard right—is important because all the character he has in his classic ‘I’ve seen it all before’ look is made up of all those constituent parts. A friend of mine stopped by and said, ’There’s a subliminal message in his beard, but I can’t make it out.’ There isn’t [laughs].”
“With all of these the fact is that the representation is almost an absurdist project because all of these stars are so overrepresented. But that’s where painting has a rather interesting intervention because it singularizes their expressive capacity. And like a capacitor, it stores energy—energy that’s meant to be released in real time as you look at them. They could be hung in the lobby of CAA. They don’t need galleries, they don’t need museums, because everyone can relate to this.”
Source => Elle / Via => Robert Pattinson News
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