Contemporary Original abstract oil mixed media painting signed by Phyllis Crolla

Contemporary Original abstract oil mixed media painting signed by Phyllis Crolla portrait. Painting, depicting a abstracted quarter-length head study, signed, framed.

Picture size 25 x 17 inches. Frame size 27 x 19 inches. Good condition, some signs of age, please see photos. Born London 9.10.62.

Obtained Fine Arts Degree with first class honours in July 1982. Has lived and travelled extensively in the USA, Marocco, France, Is- rael, Aegean Islands and Italy. Has been living and working in Rome since 1986. 3rd International Contemporary Art Fair, London Olim- pia (London Gallery and Planet Arts), USA George Maroun Fine Arts. Germany, Britta Heberle Gallery Frankfurt.

4th International Contemporary Art Fair, London Olimpia (London Gallery and Planet Arts), USA. Anne Mather Gallery, Lajolla, California. Jean-Pierre Haik Gallery, Paris, Great Britain. 5th International Contemporary Art Fair London Olimpia (London Gallery and Planet Arts). PHYLLIS CROLLA by Bill Hopkins.

The most cursory inspection of Phyllis Crolla's paintings reveals immediately that as an artist she is primarily a cerebralist and very much a painters painter. The extraordinary power generated by the dozen or so images selected to make up this exhibition of her recent work also rev- eals a seriousness and depth of commitment that dictinguishes art which is enduring from that which is superficial and passing. Equally in accord with the demands of authentic art is the austeri- ty of subject matter, the relentless execution bordering on bru tality, and the deliberately restricted palette. If Phyllis Crolla refuses to please with seductive pictures, or at tractive colours, her harshness of approach creates a controlled claustrophobic intensity almost trance-like in its stillness, this sta- sis, or suspension of natural flow, introduces into the portrayed faces and figures not the elegaic passivity of defeat of first glance but, beneath, the disturbing resonances of demonical possession. Her work, in short, is an architectured exploration of stational forces seething before detonation into change.

The depiction of indefinable savagery moving beneath cold sur- faces resolutely dissallow specific images from leaving the mind, and others, as I discovered, gratuitously pester themselves into recollection long after they are initially viewed. The fusion of the glacial and the molten communicates a Kafka-ish threat of almost electrical power. The more abstract canvases in the exhibition, all with keyed sex- ual references that obstruct them from being definitively abstract but more academically placeable between the dispersal of the representational and the first billowings of abstraction, evoke echoes of that other painter's painter, Fautrier, and more distant ly, de Kooning in his wraiths of the early Fifties. Whether these are conscious ghosts beckoning her on, I do not know Although I suspect they are shadows that have merely gone before and now inescapably haunt the path she is traversing. If the implication is that this is a crucial area of reconnoissance, I would not disagree.

What Phyllis Crolla is unequivocally addressing, relates to dissolving identity and meaning, the fundamental issues of our time. It is the henchmark of her seriousness that she confronts the col- lapsing certainties and anomalies of present day awareness on a level that rejects the fallacious appearances of normal with its masks and touches on the hell of individual emptiness. If Fautrier and de Kooning are coincidental company, there can be no doubt about the influential role Frances Bacon exercises with the artist. An examination of Crolla's Three Figures to my mind the outstanding picture of the exhibition-shows Bacon's presence unmistakeably in every way. Quite clearly, without his prior work the painting would not have been composed, and yet the picture is a precocious masterpiece in its own right is self evident!

The seeming contradiction is resolved through the fact that the Three Figures is a rebuttal not an endorsement of Bacon, despite her obvious respect for his achievements. In fact the importance of this painting, apart from being a wry salute to an old mentor, is that it is both an expression of apostasy and a declaration of an altogether apposing existentalist position. In exorcising Bacon's vision of valueless life, Crolla advances the perpetual replacement principal.

From this she has constructed an antiphonal dialogue that explains much of the sustained tension and the vertebra of her work. This I suggest, is particularly apparant in the more powerfull paintings such as Threnody, the catatonic Scream, and the di aphonous Again and Again...... Where the propulsion has been ac cumulated and distilled, as opposed to the more rapidly composed images. In concluding these brief remarks, I would just add that Phyllis Crolla's paintings confirms a long held contention of mine that the future of contemporary painting must inexorably become more cerebral and encoded for advanced small audiences. In this context her work is uniquely inflamable and capable of both in- finite extension and study.