The Brooklyn Rail

Phil Frost’s multi-media constructions feature a cast of heavy-lidded cartoonish faces in garish neons, gawping through intricate white patterning, that has become one of his most consistent and recognizable motifs—hand-drawn in painstaking detail using white-out correction fluid, without the use of stencils. The artist’s electrifying imagery is painted onto found objects, wood panels, and canvas. (They have also been printed onto sneakers and toys as part of Frost’s brand collaborations.) The compositions are completed by the addition of found objects including coins, cans, license plates, grimy cloths, and magazine cut-outs. These items are not so much actively scouted for as noticed by Frost as he goes about his day. It can take years for a work to reach its conclusion, as there can be no predicting when and what items will be right for any given work. In terms of the overall aesthetic, think the haggard, street-worn, junkyard leer of Ed Roth’s Rat Fink, meets Polynesian ritual masks, set amongst a whirl of repeating sixties retro stylings. In scale and form, Frost’s work ranges from totemic sculptural uprights, to billboards, to large-scale canvases so complex and vivid in their architecture that they read as mystical designs akin to the Tocapu geometries of Andean textiles.

Frost came of age in the 1990s, spraying and wheat-pasting his motley cavalcade of motifs and characters onto the urban milieu of New York City, where he honed his practice, alongside fellow street artists such as Shepard Fairey, Barry McGee, and Clare E. Rojas. Alleged Gallery on Ludlow Street, founded by Aaron Rose, became a nexus for artists influenced by skateboard culture, hip hop, and graffiti who were active at the time, with many of them showing there during the gallery’s ten year stretch between 1992 and 2002. In 2004, Rose organized the seminal exhibition Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture, which opened at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati and toured internationally for five years. It included Frost and his peers, but the exhibition also functioned as something of a timeline, too, charting the genre’s arc by showing the work of progenitors like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Keith Haring alongside that of newer generations and by inviting local street artists to contribute work at venues throughout the show’s run.

For his current exhibition, Interstitial Stint at Ruttkowski;68, Frost presents five individual pieces and a diptych, all of which began as found wood doors and are approximately 6 by 2 feet. They have been installed exquisitely: the five single works have been hung along one wall in the main gallery, while the paired panels, Hegemony Coalescing (Diptych) (2016–21), occupy the back room. Each of them has been given ample space so that their enigmatic resonance draws the viewer in close to investigate the many details, textures, and surfaces, yet when we stand back and view them in succession they have a striking air of noble monumentality à la Easter Island’s Moai statues. Conversely—and re-entering the twenty-first century and the realm of music—they are also redolent of the chill, graphically animated members of the band Gorillaz, which was formed in the early 2000s and was similarly influenced by hip hop. Frost’s surfaces have been coated with synthetic polymer to protect them, but as if in defiance, some elements such as shards of wood break through the clear layer. Every plane of the assemblages is decorated, including the sides, which are as much as nine inches deep.

Frost has affixed different lengths of wood around the frames, which jut out and disrupt the otherwise uniform shape of the doors, so that each structure has its own off-kilter take on the basic rectangle. Rung Badge of Hardiness Draped as Bust (2016–21) is particularly noteworthy for the way its perimeter additions provide a contour that amplifies the uncanny mien of the central face and become a full—if malformed—body for this creature. In the top right, a strut continues up beyond the top horizontal edge, ending in a sharpened, curved point, like a devilish horn, while what appear to be arms rest by our hero’s sides. At the top left, further extensions give the appearance of a hunched-up, enlarged shoulder. The effect is both comical and pitiful—perhaps a comment on the state of pop culture.

Decommissioned from their intended function as partitions dividing (or connecting) different spaces, Frost’s doors nevertheless retain a metaphorical echo of their origins, as the exhibition title suggests. They still straddle boundaries and throughways: between the real and spiritual, fine and street art, the ancient and today, mythical and terrestrial, human and alien. There’s the intimation that Frost is inviting us to pass from the quotidian hum through the looking-glass, beyond his fun-fair entryways, and into his fantastical chimeras, an offer that is difficult to resist.