On tie-Dye's
Huge, wall-sized sheets of linen are stained with concentric rings of blazing colour. The technique is immediately recognizable: tie-dye, an ancient Eastern process of textile design appropriated by the American counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s as a by-word for peace, freedom and protest against the Vietnam War, which has long since entered the western world's fashion mainstream.
Its use here as a form of artistic expression is a very deliberate choice on the part of the artist, as too is the scale and palette of the various untitled works. The paintings are as American as Bugs Bunny and pecan pie, open plains on which past meets present to paint a new American landscape; the Manifest Destiny tailored to a modernist sensibility. Stretched and framed, they represent something of an anomaly. Walking the line between high and low art, mass production and hand-made craft, the works knowingly reference several of America's most iconic visual images.
The considerable size of the works is rooted in the Abstract Expressionist heroism of Jackson Pollock, Barrnett Newman, and those that followed them, while their palette abandons the acidic psychedelia traditionally associated with tie-dye imagery in favour of the lyrical hues reminiscent of Colour Field artists such as Morrris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland. Continuing the experiments begun by Turner, Kandsinsky and Albers, this latter group was interested in the atmospheric effects of colour, enveloping the viewer in an impersonal and unashamedly two-dimensional environment on a monumental scale.
The dominant motif in each of Phelan's works, a target, is similarly borrrowed from the Color Field lexicon, specifically the paintings made by Noland between 1958-62. They were not intended to be read as targets per se, unlike those that Jasper Johns was producing at around the same time. Rather, the target functioned as it had several decades earlier in the work of Robert Delaunay: as a purely formal device, devoid of narrative or overtly personal expression and well suited to the artist's investigations into abstraction.
Aligning the colours in dense rings serves to concentrate their effects and intensify their relationships. Some recede quietly while others advance, pulsating with life. The process by which the works are created is of less importance than the choice of their colours, which is made by the artist with the aid of a computerised pantone. When this has been done, the physical act of production is entrusted to a specialized workshop in the artist's home state of Texas. Chance of course plays its part, dictating the way in which different dyes will react and determining the extent of irregularity in the the staining at the rings' edges.

Galerie Edward Mitterrand, 2006
Galerie Edward Mitterrand is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Michael Phelan: If today was perfect, there would be no need for tomorrow, concerning Manifest Destiny and the American appropriation of symbols and techniques from foreign cultures using mass market materials and the employment of manufactured help – a practice mimicked in the production of Phelan’s work.

Furthermore, Phelan is interested in how the United States’ concept of ‘manifest destiny’ evolved from westward expansion to globalization and the absorption of foreign especially “Eastern” ideas and aesthetics referring to the belief that western redemption lies in the east. Incorporating disparate means to explore the contemporary American landscape, Phelan references art history, neo-spirituality and bad public art. His shifting frame of reference allows Phelan to reposition existing modes and models complicating his work with multiple readings.

In his series of tie-dye “paintings,” Phelan is not primarily interested in a neo-hippie sense of togetherness against established systems; rather, he is interested in appropriating countercultural “exotic” motifs emphasizing group-oriented craft and the American landscape. Century old examples of fabric dying such as Batik and Shibori, a Japanese term close to tie dye (shape resist dying), have been found in Malaysia, South America, the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa and India. The culmination of tie-dye in the United States occurred during the 1960s’ hippie movement extending to today’s reemergence of tie-dye as worn by overweight housewives purchased at the ironically titled Banana Republic.

Phelan’s tie-dye paintings as American landscapes are also remincent of pour painting on unprimed canvas as pioneered by Helen Frankenthaler, who influenced Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. Frankenthaler considered her work in the tradition of American landscape painting as in her breakthrough 1953 work “Mountains and Sea.” Phelan’s tie-dye painting are sized in the “big painting” tradition and despite their production involve misplaced stains and imperfections allowing them to work as American landscapes with vague plant forms, sunsets and open sky.

Saatchi Gallery, 2007
Huge, wall-sized sheets of linen are stained with concentric rings of blazing colour. The technique is immediately recognizable: tie-dye, an ancient Eastern process of textile design appropriated by the American counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s as a by-word for peace, freedom and protest against the Vietnam War, which has long since entered the western world's fashion mainstream.

Its use here as a form of artistic expression is a very deliberate choice on the part of the artist, as too is the scale and palette of the various untitled works. The paintings are as American as Bugs Bunny and pecan pie, open plains on which past meets present to paint a new American landscape; the Manifest Destiny tailored to a modernist sensibility. Stretched and framed, they represent something of an anomaly. Walking the line between high and low art, mass production and hand-made craft, the works knowingly reference several of America's most iconic visual images.

The considerable size of the works is rooted in the Abstract Expressionist heroism of Jackson Pollock, Barrnett Newman, and those that followed them, while their palette abandons the acidic psychedelia traditionally associated with tie-dye imagery in favour of the lyrical hues reminiscent of Colour Field artists such as Morrris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland. Continuing the experiments begun by Turner, Kandsinsky and Albers, this latter group was interested in the atmospheric effects of colour, enveloping the viewer in an impersonal and unashamedly two-dimensional environment on a monumental scale.

The dominant motif in each of Phelan's works, a target, is similarly borrrowed from the Color Field lexicon, specifically the paintings made by Noland between 1958-62. They were not intended to be read as targets per se, unlike those that Jasper Johns was producing at around the same time. Rather, the target functioned as it had several decades earlier in the work of Robert Delaunay: as a purely formal device, devoid of narrative or overtly personal expression and well suited to the artist's investigations into abstraction.

Aligning the colours in dense rings serves to concentrate their effects and intensify their relationships. Some recede quietly while others advance, pulsating with life. The process by which the works are created is of less importance than the choice of their colours, which is made by the artist with the aid of a computerised pantone. When this has been done, the physical act of production is entrusted to a specialized workshop in the artist's home state of Texas. Chance of course plays its part, dictating the way in which different dyes will react and determining the extent of irregularity in the the staining at the rings' edges. JASPER SHARP for "Triumph of Painting: Abstract America"