Phoebe Derlee: Burns

Art has gone through all kinds of fascinating definitions and re-definitions in the last couple centuries. And while most of them are illuminating, they’re also usually woefully inadequate. Craft raised to the level of virtuosity. Object stripped of decoration and re-dressed in ideas. Window into how the artist’s unconscious sees.

So while it’s tempting to look at the seemingly naïve paintings of the New York artist Phoebe Derlee through one of these lenses, it is ultimately far more tempting to throw them all out and come out with some new definition altogether.

That makes a peculiar kind of sense because when she was studying painting at school in New York and Paris, she found herself being pushed by her teachers to venture toward various known directions, as teachers do. But ultimately, she felt like none of these directions really represented her—whatever that meant, whoever she was. Slowly, she started stripping those approaches down, to reveal her own interests in what art represented to her, to dig down into her own world and her own psyche. This slowly evolved into an aesthetic of archly simplistic imagery, clearly and quickly painted, on a mission to convey immediate and fundamental aspects of her daily life.

An early show of work in Brooklyn featured large-scale nude self-portraits, made by combining photography and painting. Her 2024 New York solo debut show featured hyperstark portraits of herself and people in her circle, including her partner, the painter Hadi Falapishi. But even these slides of  la vie quotidienne did not feel essential or representational enough—in today’s landscape, personal glimpses and naked figures have acquired an aesthetic armor-plating all their own.

Her most recent work takes the pursuit of the personal to a new and interior level. This is illustrated best by a series of self-portraits in a very specific pose, lying down, on her side, fully awake. The face is a study in contrasts—in repose, but on the qui vive. Thoughtful, yet fretful. Distant, but present. For Derlee, the pose was not composed to embody these contrasts; it was rather an image that occurs to her often when she thinks about where and how she exists in the world. As symbolic as the image might seem to an outsider, it’s intensely personal to the artist.

“In some ways, I feel more naked in these paintings than I do in the ones where I am actually naked,” Derlee says.

Other motifs in Derlee’s latest work serve a similar function: flashes of objects she finds repeatedly occurring to her, helping to stake out the mental environment she inhabits. A loaf of bread. An empty pitcher. A simple road curving into the distance. They’re denuded of sentiment and genre, but not feeling or import. They aren’t real aspects of Derlee’s world. She doesn’t live for carbs. It’s not her favorite country drive. They are rather rhythmically recurrent images and ideas that help to formulate the symbolic portable environment that the artist—and perhaps every artist?—carries within her. They are glimmers of the automatrix that she creates and that in turn creates her. The highly personal and meaningful world that each of us makes which makes each of us back.

That seems as good a definition of art as any.

– David Colman