Phil Hale, Walk Through Walls… Or Don’t, Ryan Graff Contemporary
By Laura Hines
Phil Hale, Silkscreen on antique map
“Whatever choice you make, make it the right one.”
WALK THROUGH WALLS… OR DON’T. It seems like an impossible choice: pass through an impervious thing… or not. The proposal presents itself as one perfectly viable option in contrast to another. The brain sputters, logic stalls: What kind of riddle is this? A metaphor, a psychological trick, a nod to quantum physics? An absurdist joke? What is a wall, after all? And who am I, here, seriously considering the choice?
Phil Hale, Walk Through Walls or Don’t (07), (04), oil on canvas
“Proof it HAPPENED.”
Eight new oil paintings by figurative artist Phil Hale hang in enigmatically matched pairs. The duos weren’t decided until they arrived at Ryan Graff Contemporary for mounting, partnered in the moment based on intuitive relationships of opposition and association.
The canvases are raw, frayed, unframed; no placards in sight. In the far corner of the gallery, preparatory sketches on stained, jaundiced paper are collaged behind glass, with fragments of vintage photographs and book spines sparingly attached.
Silkscreens of the show’s title card have been made on the back sides of English road maps from the last century. On the evening of the show’s opening, Hale delightedly unfolds the maps for gallery guests, pointing out bits of ink bleeding through the prints, remnants of trips painstakingly plotted in the past. Proof of life.
“I just like it because it’s shitty,” he laughs, holding up a tattered corner. He relishes the chaos of the blemishes, their defiance of time and precision. In his own practice, paint, brush, and canvas collaborate with experience and taste; from moment to moment, the outcome is never known. Control is a death-knell, a flaw can become a windfall.
Phil Hale, Walk Through Walls or Don’t (04), graphite on antique prints, photograph
“We must see reality as it really is.”
Apocalypse is in the air and on the psyche.
We watch in horror as the most moneyed men on earth insistently trumpet the inevitable obsolescence of organic life, leveraging systems of power and influence to lull humanity into consensual servitude and intellectual surrender. From the comfortable distance of their doomsday bunkers and phallic rocketships they jockey for top spot as the next mecha-messiah, breathlessly speedrunning the death cult’s wet dream, the end times.
Meanwhile, noise, violence, volatility, and confusion flood our awareness every day. The climate is collapsing, the food is poison, stability is elusive. The animal body reacts, fighting, fleeing, fawning. This confounding mix of signals pits our senses against each other. Information flows more freely than ever before, and yet it swamps us with noxious, disorienting fumes, disconnecting us from ourselves, the reality in which we live, and all relationships within it.
So it’s a startling thing to see the felt experience of the now in a painting.
Phil Hale, Walk Through Walls or Don’t (05), (08), oil on canvas
In Walk Through Walls or Don’t 08, a male figure in a stark white Cricket kit thrashes towards an invisible foe while a colossal cow quietly grazes in a field. A pastoral scene punctuated by impotent, performative, misplaced violence. The cow seems untroubled. The man appears more animal than the animal.
To the left is a foreboding counterpart, Walk Through Walls or Don’t 05. Against a stony sky above a Turner-like seaside, mysterious billowing forms seem to stretch up and tumble down at the same time, unfolding and reversing, furrowed like wrinkled skin or nylon parachutes. It feels like witnessing an atomic detonation with no apparent seam between man-made materials and landscape. Nature has subsumed human folly.
Throughout the show, boundaries are simultaneously sharp and nebulous. Organic figures possess an inanimate quality and vice versa. The work jumps between journalistic accuracy and nightmarish ambiguity, awash in a muted, sallow palette of diluted ochres, browns, and greens, with occasional punctuations of brake light red or acid green. The paintings, like reality, feel confronting and slippery.
The viewer probes for story and meaning in the forms, for relationships between them. There are overtones of systemic breakdowns (the poisoned well of toxic masculinity, the existential doomerism of tech oligarchs). But the eye cannot own what it’s looking at. It can’t classify or standardize. Narrative control is futile, passivity impossible. Nothing is linear, nothing is static, not even a ghostly still life of anemic roses sliding off the edge of the canvas.
And yet there’s electricity in the uncertainty. The paintings have a physical and energetic momentum, a living force as raw as the immediacy of Hale’s preparatory sketches. It’s an aliveness that arises from crisis and discomfort, when doubt becomes a crossroad.
Phil Hale, Walk Through Walls or Don’t (01), (03), oil on canvas
“Follow the signal.”
With each pair of paintings, Phil Hale lays bare the anatomy of choice. Yes/no, left/right. The work evokes the fleeting moment of overlapping realities, when all the conditions of our being converge to meet and respond to the binary, cutting through the fog of conflicting information and impulses like a laser beam. It’s the point of connection, the sum of ourselves and the whole of the world.
Yes or no, do or don’t?
Somewhere along the live wire, in that moment of inhalation before the act, a signal flutters in the animal body. A decision is made. A new universe of branching possibilities unfolds; the future is far from a foregone conclusion. Planetary doom of a particular scriptural, tech-driven flavor isn’t destiny, no matter what the oligarchs say. It doesn’t make the pervasive dread go away, or the confusion, but even in the shadow of catastrophic reality the choice remains a source of freedom and agency. It’s the signal of life.
WALK THROUGH WALLS OR DON’T is on view at Ryan Graff Contemporary in San Francisco through October 3rd, 2026.
Phil Hale, Walk Through Walls or Don’t (06), oil on canvas
Phil Hale, Walk Through Walls or Don’t (02), oil on canvas
Phil Hale, Walk Through Walls or Don’t (06), graphite on antique paper, photograph, book cover