As Cece Philips makes her Asia debut at Seoul’s Peres Projects gallery, we lifestyle the seductive, isolated in-betweenery of the London-based artist.
“I discovered Cece Philips’ work and was immediately struck by the originality of the subject matter,” says Kacey Eun Hye Cho, managing director of Peres Projects gallery, Seoul. “A world populated with females in very cinematic tones. It gave me this feeling that was connected to the avant-garde of the early-20th-century in places like Paris, where black Americans in particular went in order to avoid the racism they were facing. It gave me this feeling of not just nostalgia but also possibility, where these people could live their lives authentically, and this is something that’s very special about her work, and something that you don’t see, so I was immediately struck by it.”
Philips’ second iteration with Peres (following Berlin last year) is also the London-based artist’s debut Asia show. “The characters we left in the twilight of Berlin now emerge in the dawn light of Seoul with this show, Walking the In-Between,” says Cho. And how. Philips continues to explore liminal spaces, times and situations with her signature snap and glow. We take long strolls through a composite cosmopolis reminiscent of London, Florence and California, draped in the hues of the blue hours. And inhabited by suited women. Betwixt day and night, between dog and wolf, a mysterious atmosphere lingers over each tableau. We observe each scene from its periphery through an open window, from the opposite sidewalk, from behind a bush, or sofa placed in a voyeuristic position. While gazing is usually encouraged in a gallery, here our glance becomes more clandestine.
Despite the self-evident parallels with Edward Hopper, Philips says her work is most often likened to the cinema of Stanley Kubrick. There’s no small irony in that. Her becalmed Chiswick studio (well, apart from the spontaneous yelping of her 15-month-old pet canine Koda as strangers walk by) is beside the paddling swans and ducks
on a quiescent stretch of the Thames, and close to the home and grave of the painter William Hogarth (1697-1764).
Although worlds apart, Hogarth lived at a time when art was becoming more commercialised, in the windows of shops, taverns and buildings when something called “the novel” was becoming a thing. Hogarth hit upon a new idea: “To treat my subjects as a dramatic writer; my picture was my stage.” Ironically, when Kubrick shot Barry Lyndon in 1975, he based his cinematography around the mise-en-scene and lighting of several Hogarth paintings. From 17th-century Hogarth as moodboard on 20th-century Kubrick to 21st-century Philips, subliminal or no, we sense the circularity of art’s aesthetics. Hogarth even self-portraited himself with his own beloved pug.
While Philips is acutely conscious of the contemporary urban scrollopolis of digital living, she’s not always in sync with it. “With social media now there’s just this expectation that artists – and even writers too – must be doing things in front of the camera, and sell the dream, and “show” themselves or put themselves out there, and I’ve not always felt comfortable doing that.”
When she’s not loving or liking electronic excitation on others, she splits her working days into two. In the morning, she listens to podcasts – Talk Art, Great Women Artists, How to Fail, true crime (the genre) and Desert Island Discs – and music in the afternoon. We talk about artists she follows on Instagram – Khushna Salaman-Butt, Faye Wei Wei (though she hasn’t seen a piece IRL), Louise Giovanelli – and we both acknowledge the latest offering – a winking black cat in the shape of a pea on a plate – by South Korean artist Minyoung Kim at Taymour Grahne. We talk about Gagosian London’s (Britannia Street) latest group show of black artists (which she hasn’t yet seen) and reminisce over last year’s Into the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery.
We’re constantly reminded of just how nascent Philips’s art evolution is. It is, after all, only two years since her debut in the show On Love at HOME gallery. “I was lucky,” she says. “In 2021, Ronan Mackenzie set up HOME and there was a collaborative opportunity. Ronan asked if I’d like to do a show, and honestly … it was a very public place to have a show, and also an experiment or exercise in how to do a show; there were panel talks, a selection of books, and even the sets – armchairs, rugs – were designed… it felt very homey compared to a conventional white-cube gallery.” Philips conjured 11 pieces for the show and created another in the space. “At first I thought it would be great, having so many people coming in and talking, but ultimately I didn’t feel comfortable having people watching me in the act of painting that final work.”
Philips has Sierra Leone heritage on her father’s side, and for that first presentation, enlarging a period she studied during her history degree, she created factual historical figures of reference. “A lot of my research in history on West Africa went into my first show.” As such, the work reminds us of Alice Neel’s early work in the American artist’s current show Hot Off the Griddle at London’s Barbican, in which, we sense as much a documentarian and researcher at work, as a painter.
Certainly there’s been a stylistic evolution in Philips’ more recent output. Note the ABC linearity in her composition: attire, body language and colour. She goes from visual documentarian, à la Neel, to vivid, fantastical and saturated-seeming Prada Mode in Los Angeles, much of which may have to do with Philips finding her painterly voice, and more confidence. “I’ve moved away from looking at real historical figures, to more imaginative faces and places. And perhaps more than ever now, with the painting, it’s about me. Previously, I’d been on the outside looking in, but now I’m thinking more about my own identity.”
In the famous ’60s French film Playtime, director Jacques Tati pre-empted so much of the contemporary world’s voyeuristic vibe. In one notable sequence, the protagonist Hulot meets a friend who invites him into his super-modern apartment. The sequence is filmed from across the street, at distance – we’re voyeurs, an aesthetic meta-reminder of our disconnected selves. Voyeurs watching voyeurs, screen-based surveillance. Characters intimate yet separated. Presence, absence.
In the world according to Philips’ paintings, that could be a subliminal narrative about the black experience, prompting questions about race, identity, belonging, being othered, being alienated. Or its opposite: not having to carry the historical weight of gender or race and finding identity without all the constructs. As American artist Amy Sherald, painter of former First Lady Michelle Obama (2018) and represented by Hauser & Wirth, said on the eve of Frieze London last year: “There’s so much that dictates the role of how we’re supposed to be, whether as a Black person or a woman.”
Or, Philips could be riffing off prolific Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s narrator’s sentiment in After Dark (2004). Fit this series of quotes to pictures on the walls of Peres Projects Seoul. “People with places to go and people with no place to go; people with a purpose and people with no purpose; people trying to hold time back and people trying to urge it forward; the silence is so deep it hurts our ears.” Or, “Time moves in a special way in the middle of the night. Sometimes I feel as if I’m racing with my own shadow. But that’s one thing I’ll never be able to outrun. Nobody can shake off their own shadow.” And lastly: “It’s not as if our lives are simply divided into light and dark. There’s a shadowy middle ground. Recognising and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does.”
Along with cooking. She has a predilection for pasta and summons a reference to molecular chef Ferran Adrià. “Did you see the documentary on El Bulli?” she asks, adding how much she loved the experience. And then, like a split-screen on one of her paintings, she opens a simultaneous segue or storyboard of cinematic reference on Ralph Fiennes in The Menu, and more.
“I watched The Menu the same week as Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness. Please watch the latter. It’s darkly funny, and I love these very long damning criticisms of this luxurious world. I like that feeling of being made uncomfortable; when you see small details the director puts in to make it uncomfortable.”
That word crops up often in her speech and percolates like atmosphere through her works. “I like the idea of it being a bit dark, but then I do like colour. But I like it to feel unsettling in terms of who’s looking at who and who’s watching who – that’s something that I’ve been going through myself, me thinking more about my role as an observer, or artists, or painting figures, just getting to look, and observe and see and record, and I think at some point I just started to feel a little bit like a voyeur of other people.”
Philips will graduate this year with an MA in painting from London’s Royal College of Art. She’s already had a show with Post Gallery in Zurich, and group shows with the likes of Gillian Jason Gallery and, most recently, Cob Gallery in London. The sky’s the limit, it seems.
“When I look at the volume of work I’ve created, it’s like a mix of something quite exciting but also something unsettling. I think more and more there are details coming into my painting which are more autobiographical. And a lot of the people I’m painting now are more ambiguous. It’s just exciting to see where it goes. But it’s slowly evolving into something.”
Whatever that becomes, for now, there’s something about Cece. We obsess at the beauty and blue-ty and “soundfeel” of her work. Her kind of blue, her painting it black, her velvet blue, electron blue, her hip Hoppery, her scrollopolis, her mellow yellow, her lightstrip, her dandy “dazethetica” of dawn-, morn- and twilight-form. Her Prada Mode-ishness meets LA-party-vibe. Her leisuretude, her Black Katz, her Mulholland Drive-vibe, her contemporary/historical intervisuality, and oozy-woozy-bluesy in-betweenery. Because, while it could be Kubrick’s Lyndon, or Hogarth’s Chiswick, it’s also Top Gun Maverick (her favourite film of last year, so epic she saw it twice) in its opening minutes, filmed in the dark dawn of the heavens in saturant hyper glow. We fanboy, fangirl and fangallery in the presence of Philips’ work, in which, not unlike Maverick, the mission, or in this case, the in-betweenery, justifies and celebrates its beautiful self.
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(Header image featuring Soon (2023), Cece Philips)
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