New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Artist creates upbeat COVID-era pieces for exhibit
GREENWICH — In early 2020, Guy Stanley Philoche was riding a wave of success.
After years of struggling, the New York-based artist had just had a sold-out solo exhibition in Chelsea. Philoche could barely produce enough works to meet the demand of his growing list of collectors, which by then included Fortune 500 companies and celebrities.
His plan, at the time, was to buy a $20,000 Rolex watch with his earnings. In hindsight, he acknowledged that the purchase might seem self-indulgent. But it felt like a sign to Philoche, 44, who was born in Haiti and immigrated to Connecticut as a child, that he had really made it.
But the watch was never purchased. In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic struck, decimating New York City and disrupting the art world that had nurtured Philoche for more than two decades. His peers struggled to support themselves as galleries and museums closed and sales of art slumped considerably.
Newly prosperous and gaining momentum, Philoche made the surprising decision to share the wealth.
“Now that I’m in the room, and even better, now that I actually have a seat at the table, I’m looking around and I’m like, ‘Guys, there’s a lot of room here,’ ” he said. “There’s a lot of room for people to eat. So why are we being so stingy with it?”
Philoche began an initiative to purchase art from local artists, which earned him a bevy of national press. In the last year, he has spent more than $100,000 and bought more than 300 pieces of art, some from artists who had previously never made a sale. More recently, he also launched a partnership with Vans and the Fairfield Comedy Club to sell custom-designed sneakers. The profits will support comedians who have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.
His new purchases overran his house and spilled into a storage space, where Philoche keeps all the paintings, sculpture and works in other mediums that he has acquired.
“He’s really become a philanthropist here,” said Ron Cavalier, owner of the Cavalier Ebanks Gallery in Greenwich, where Philoche has a new exhibition that opened Saturday. “And it’s very unusual for an artist to support other artists. Particularly in this field it’s just incredibly competitive. And very few can make a living at it. But that didn’t matter to him. What mattered to him was taking care of other people.”
Cavalier has been a champion of Philoche’s work since they met four years ago. He has exhibited Philoche’s paintings in Greenwich and also at his galleries in Chelsea and Florida. Cavalier has encouraged the artist’s philanthropic endeavors and creative growth, even as Philoche moved away from the abstract and modernist paintings that had gained him fame.
“Especially if you’re selling, the gallery doesn’t want you to stop painting the same narrative over
and over and over,” Philoche said. “You get stuck in a bubble.”
For Philoche — whom Cavalier called “tireless” — stagnating was not an option. During the COVID-19 pandemic, while amassing a sizable art collection, he painted prolifically.
In quarantine, Philoche began working on a new series of paintings he collectively titled “Love” and “rEVOLution,” some of which will be on display at the Cavalier Gallery. It’s Philoche’s first pop art show and a break from his earlier color field influences. His earlier work is reminiscent of Barnett Newman and, especially, Mark Rothko.
Art supplies were difficult to come by at the height of the pandemic, Philoche said, so many of the works were painted on masonite board fastened to two-byfours. The result? His heaviest and most figurative works to date.
Many of the pieces feature Peanuts characters, including
Snoopy, Franklin and Lucy, along-side Banksy-esque scrawling of the words “Love” and “Revolution.” There are certain Philoche hallmarks that remain, according to Cavalier. His heavy use of impasto and bisecting lines are present, as are his frequent references to New York City. But in general, the new works represent a conscious move away from more serious subject matter by Philoche.
“There was a lot of artists who have been painting some amazing, important works” about the pandemic, Philoche said. “But I just think that people want to smile again, you know?”
So he returned to simpler times, when he was eating cereal and watching cartoons in his parents’ home as a child.
Those memories and, more generally, his experiences growing up the son of immigrants in a series of Fairfield County towns and cities, have had a profound impact on Philoche’s life and work.
It wasn’t an easy path to become a working artist. Growing up, his siblings and cousins, all exceptional athletes, expected Philoche to play sports. But he could neither catch nor dribble a ball.
His parents, too, made sacrifices to ensure that their children would be secure in America, and they had particular ideas about his career.
“For them, it was all about pursuing the American dream,” Philoche said. “It was either getting a government job with a pension, you know, or becoming a lawyer or a doctor. I remember telling my parents, ‘Listen, I’m going to go to art school.’ I will never forget, my mom said, ‘I scrubbed enough toilets so you never have to. I am not paying for to go to art school.’”
They made good on the promise.
Philoche moved out at 17, paid his own way through art school and lived, for a long time, as a struggling artist in New York City.
Early on, he printed out cheap fliers of his work and stuck them in copies of the Village Voice — the now-defunct but legendary alt-weekly — under cover of night every Wednesday when it would hit the newsstands. When Philoche finally got his first solo show, he couldn’t afford a U-Haul to transport his artwork. So Philoche, who lives in Harlem, strapped as much of his artwork as he could to a dolly and made several, long trips to the Lower Manhattan gallery where his paintings would be shown.
Those days of transporting art are not that far in Philoche’s past. And in his philanthropic work, as well as in his recent art work, past is present.
“It just made me it just made me work harder and stay focused,” Philoche said. “And for that I thank them so much. Because I think if they had given me help then I wouldn’t have taken it seriously. I would maybe be a hobbyist painter. But the fact that failure wasn’t an option, I had no choice but to succeed.”