Art Review

Think Big: A dozen paintings by Jason Phillips at Richard Heller Gallery appear to have been made by a miniaturist who couldn’t quite quell his desire to paint big pictures.

Except for one 4-foot-square panel, all of the young artist’s oils have dimensions that share more with yardsticks than with conventional paintings. Measuring between 1 and 2 inches wide and up to 8 feet long, these meticulously rendered images present slices of life that range from the impossibly Surreal to the weirdly realistic.

Phillips is at his best when the shapes of his paintings accentuate the stories they depict. For example, the devastating isolation you might feel if you were on a burning sailboat in the middle of the sea is given vivid visual form by 20 vertical inches of sickly yellow sky that weigh down on a minuscule boat, which seems even more helpless and insignificant than its tiny size suggests.

Other effective works use their odd format to focus attention on charged details. Noteworthy are a high-speed chase over an arched bridge, a helicopter flying over a forest fire and a matador facing off with a bull in the middle of nowhere.

When Phillips’ paintings pair otherwise unrelated elements, their extreme format becomes a mere gimmick. An image of a jet-fighter flying over an abandoned refrigerator and another of a blimp drifting over a gallows come off as Surrealistic cliches, which cannot deliver the compressed emotional impact of Phillips’ best pictures.

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* Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through March 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.