-Alice Pelot
Brad Phillips’ painting Memoir Study (Mottled Green) (2011), hung above the front desk at Toronto’s Division Gallery, is the cover of a would-be Penguin-published book titled “Personal Work”, a nod to the highly edited fictions that comprise his autobiographical body of works. In the gallery’s front space are Phillips’ hyper-realistic oil paintings of unusual floral arrangements, witty word play, and intimate scenes of his partner Cristine Brache. Brache appears in his works in an obscurely sexually romantic, and yet not out-rightly erotic, way. The paintings capture their personal relationship and Brache’s consent in Phillips’ practice as implicated through titles like Mess Made by Request 2 (2016) in which Brache has peed her jeans. The exclusion of her face and inclusion of known fetishized props such as shoes allows Phillips’ admitted perverted ventures to be confessional while also contributing to a mysterious persona onto which we might also project our own vulnerability or shame.