The Approach is pleased to present Tonic for Choice, an exhibition of large new abstract paintings by Phillip Allen. All equal in size and painted with oil on board, this newest body of work ploughs familiar painterly concerns present throughout earlier works, however, a revived energy and growing maturity has helped yield a new aesthetic crop. Gone is the reliable formula of thick impasto boarders and deep, illusionary spaces often inhabited by Allen’s painterly sculptural forms. Those devices have been replaced in favour of complex arrangements of shape and colour and a labyrinthine layering of marks, drips and scrapings evoking shifting surfaces and planes. Floating objects of varying stages of completion morph fluidly in and out of focus. Not afraid to excite viewers with visual decoration, Tonic for Choice is Allen’s strongest presentation to date of work that sets out, through trial and error, to be pertinent abstract painting for paintings’ sake.