2 VIEWS OF PHILLIPS’ SCULPTURE

Jay Phillips’ sculpture currently appears in two exhibitions, one a mini-survey, the other an up-to-the-minute report. The retrospective look is at the County Museum of Art (to Feb. 16), the present view at the Roy Boyd Gallery (to Dec. 31).

At 31, Phillips is young to be getting such saturated exposure, but he had early success with his splashy, painted aluminum sculpture, and the museum’s show is actually an overdue recognition of his winning that institution’s 1981 Young Talent Award. Twenty-one works (1979-1985) encompass his familiar, small, free-standing sculptures and large wall pieces, along with a couple of surprises--two unpainted “Vases” built of half-inch-thick sheets of welded aluminum with brushed and incised surfaces.

The smallest works--brightly painted with bold patterns in glossy enamel, then cut and folded--are displayed in a group like a big bouquet, but, sad to say, it looks a little wan and bedraggled. The pieces that once seemed so cheeky and exuberant in their use of non-traditional materials, flamboyant patterns and fold-out appendages have paled with the years of Neo-Expressionism. That’s not Phillips’ fault, just something he has to contend with. A worse problem is that the painted work tends to suggest Tom Holland gone punk and that the brushed aluminum “Vases” appear indebted to Frank Stella.

Nonetheless, Phillips genuinely had something in his early work: namely, a sure touch for wedding painting and sculpture and for turning the delicate art of pattern painting into a sport requiring both brain and muscle. Now he has pushed that well-established aesthetic identity into the terrain of more traditional painting and sculpture. That he’s not a one-note artist is apparent from the elegant “Vases” and a 10-foot-long wall piece called “View,” meshing painterly gesture and organic form.

At the Roy Boyd Gallery, Phillips is most successful in wall pieces. Some of them combine bold checkerboard grids with fold-out patterned sections and, in one case, a re-creation of a Cezanne still life. Others take a less trendy stance by interweaving stripes and lattices with gestural landscape. There’s so much latitude for growth here and so much love of painting that it seems pointless to dwell on potential pitfalls of hero worship.

Phillips’ recent forays into bronze are far less satisfying. A couple of dark sculptures, similar in form to the silver “Vases” at the museum, are so devoid of interest that you scarcely notice them. Smaller unique castings in the mode of his early, stand-up, folded aluminum pieces just look clumsy.