Along with Jasper Johns and Richard Diebenkorn, Matt Phillips is one of America’s finest masters of that most difficult of all graphic art forms, the monotype.  Even the most casual viewer will take pleasure in its light-drenched evocations of the Mediterranean and the fluency of its color and line. 

“Monotypes by Matt Phillips.” Through March 20, 2009 at Rincliffe Gallery, Drexel University, Main Building at 32nd and Chestnut St., Third Floor.  (215) 762-4114 or www.drexelcollection.edu.

The tougher the challenge,
the greater the satisfaction

With Jasper Johns and the late Richard Diebenkorn, Matt Phillips is a modern American master of that most difficult of graphic art forms, the monotype. A monotype is made by painting on a nonabsorbent surface (such as glass or copper) and pulling off what is generally a unique impression on paper.  A single mistake or misjudgment, either of design or execution, and the result is botched.

Why would anyone go through this high-wire act? Because of the challenge of the process, of course— difficult challenges are always the most satisfying— but also because of the effects you can achieve with the monotype, which are distinct to the form. 

Matt Phillips, a native New Yorker who spent much of his career at Bard College and now lives and works near San Francisco, is a superb practitioner of this form, and the choice exhibition of his monotypes and other graphic art now on view at Drexel University’s Rincliffe Gallery is courtesy of Arthur and Joanne Frank, who’ve collected Phillips’ monotypes since 1972.

Nudes reminiscent of Matisse

Both Johns and Diebenkorn were deeply influenced by Matisse, and Phillips, too, is clearly indebted to him. This is particularly evident in Phillips’s nudes, whose graceful, semi-abstract lines suggest an inhabitation of the erotic rather than a particular representation: a presence that partakes simultaneously of the decorative, the formal, and the archetypal.

Matisse achieved this distillation after a lifetime of reduction and stylization; for Phillips, it’s a point of departure in which the female figure, stripped to its simplest forms, can be used to define space or animate a domestic interior. Even in works labeled “Abstract” (a 1989 collage monotype; a 1992 hand-colored etching), that shape is still visible in the undulating lines that mold the composition.

Mediterranean light and heat

Phillips retraced some of Matisse’s footsteps in Morocco, and his cooler, more schematic takes on its culture makes for an interesting contrast. Here and elsewhere, Phillips uses large swatches of white to define space and to suggest the heat, intensity, and isolating effect of Mediterranean light. Likewise, he simplifies and stylizes forms, retaining an outward semblance of representation while revealing the bone of structure beneath. 

A particularly good example is the large 1971 monotype, Sailboats on the Ocean, in which the masts of three boats are balanced by three standing boulders, and these in turn are echoed by three largish rocks and the inverted triangles of darker blue that enter the water dagger-like from the right-hand edge of the picture.  In such works, Phillips invites us to contemplate the porous boundaries between the abstract and the representational, and the ways in which each qualifies the other.

Like jigsaw pieces at war

Many of the works on display have the cool, hieratic quality that the monotype favors, but there’s a good deal of sensuality in them too, and the born colorist’s joy in a sparing palette in which the sudden accent of a sharp color is particularly vivifying. For the most part, Phillips’s colors are pale, even washed, but he can use darker shades powerfully too, as in the two small but rhythmically taut Montana scenes from 1995, or the one representation of California in the exhibit: a shoreline in which brown and blue bite at each other like warring jigsaw pieces. 

No connoisseur of the monotype should miss this show, but pleasures abound even for the most casual viewer. My cap is tipped to my colleague Arthur Frank, chair of Drexel’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, and his wife Joanne.  Many major museums own Phillips’s work, but this collection must surely be the finest in private hands.