Impeller 1972

Peter Phillips made this painting, Impeller, with bright, flat colors and hard edges, making me think about how Pop art took the cool, clean lines of commercial design and put them in the gallery. The way Phillips layers images – a snarling jaguar, machine parts, rainbow bars, and interlocking squares – it’s like he’s riffing on the idea of a collage, but instead of pasting things together, he paints them all in the same flat plane, so they kind of vibrate against each other. Look at the way the yellow of the machine echoes the yellow in the squares. It all feels very intentional, like a puzzle where the pieces don’t quite fit. There’s something about the way the shapes are arranged that reminds me of Leger, but with a slick, pop sensibility. Phillips embraces the ambiguity of putting things together that don’t belong, inviting us to find our own meaning in the chaos.