Phillip John Velasco Gabriel at Ramiken

Artist: Phillip John Velasco Gabriel

Exhibition title: Vigilator

Venue: Ramiken, New York, US

Date: June 5, 2020 – July 10, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and RAMIKEN, New York

Seven paintings that give us a future we’ve already fallen in love with. Lucid dreams of our new robot friends, punctuated by volcanic lightning over color field deserts of flattened space. Broken Frankenstein knees straddle motorbikes accelerating under the surreal eye of a tweaker fighter pilot scanning night vision cinemas of surgi-cal violence. Residential evil versions of ourselves, pressing lips passionately within the radical safety of simulated intimacy. The green flash of the very last sunset rides shotgun into these lingering love stories, falling all over and out of the Main Narrative for a chance to satisfy the sweetest yearnings for physical touch. The plea-sures of fear, of body horror, of survival – not things we want to experience, but things we yearn to see. These are images created anew, stolen by Gabriel’s brush, framed and cropped and juiced together into one congealed surface of finessed petroleum. Each painting is several paintings: small vignettes spaced out in unlikely symme-tries across deep reservoirs of color, with redactions and pencil sketch speculations spilling out from behind the scenes. A second generation American, Gabriel’s Phillipino roots take formal possession of his compositions in his structural rip off of the Jeepney – World War II transport trucks transformed into rolling surveys of graphic illustration, parading through Manila on holiday.

Phillip John Velasco Gabriel was born in 1983 in Jacksonville, Florida. He lives and works in New York. This is his second solo exhibition at Ramiken.