Press Release

For this exhibition, Phillip Griswold continues his focus of fracturing images of the urban landscape to articulate the complex make-up of our surroundings. Originating in photographs and sketches made out in the field, Griswold paints landscapes abstracted into spaces that contain softly articulated, brushy forms intersected with bold geometry.

Rather than developing a sense for a specific place, Griswold uses the landscape as a way to explore the structure and effect of light. While there is a definite spatial quality to the work and a discernible horizon, he gently diffuses recognizable elements with planar interventions. He structures the paintings in a manner that creates dynamic formal tensions, but allowing the two forces to work in tandem, as if they occur naturally together.

This new body of work moves further yet from the representational nature of his older work, where lozenge forms, planes and cubes jostle within the landscapes, always focusing on light and spatial interplay. In one piece, a scene that references a streetscape that simultaneously alludes to strong movement while keeping a highly structured composition. In another piece, an array of variously colored, ordered planes fractures an otherwise moody clouded sky. In these and the rest of the paintings in the exhibition, the varied compositions always bring focus back to light – its architecture and the way it arcs and refracts in and out and between paintings.

Phillip Griswold received his MFA From Claremont Graduate University and lives and works in the Los Angeles area.