NEW YORK, NY.- Mathew NYC is presenting Conversations, an exhibition by Richard Phillips.

Departing from the hyperrealist paintings for which he is best known, Phillips opts for a process of reconstitution, drawing patterns from works by Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool into a staging of apparently conflicting visual registers.

In Conversation I and II (both 2015), Phillips overlays photographs produced in collaboration with Playboy magazine, with patterns lifted from Albert Oehlen's Computer Paintings series (1990-2008). The patterns, that originally appeared in black and white, are infused here with a vibrant color palette, enabling the pixel strokes from Oehlen's work to obscure the de-saturated images of model Leanna Decker - seated in Phillips' 2014 artist edition Playboy Charger.

In Canyons and Canyons II (both 2015), Christopher Wool's Untitled (1988) pattern painting is inverted, its negative laid overtop a print of a serape blanket, the recognizable Mexican garment often produced and sold as a tourist good in Marfa, TX. The Playboy magazine logo, placed in the bottom left corner, provides a third layer to the paintings' surface.

The patterns from Oehlen and Wool are thickly layered over the base images, emphasizing the distance between the elements. These patterns - both highly conscious formal experiments from the canon of contemporary painting - are rendered scrims through which the souvenir kitsch of the serape blanket and the glossy commercialism of the erotic photography are visible.

As juxtapositions free of value judgment, the works reconstitute the results of varying trajectories in the production of the visual, displaying - through their elements' non-translatability - a strategic engagement with the connoisseurship of contemporary painting.

Phillips has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. He is represented in public and private collections such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Denver Museum, Colorado; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; UBS Paine Webber Art Collection, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.