Philjames is an artist who doesn’t just remix art history—he hijacks it, joyrides through its canon, and leaves it stumbling home dazed and confused. His work sits at the crossroads of classical painting, cartoon culture, and the kind of bizarre, drug-induced visions that might emerge after a long night flipping through a Salvador Dalí book while watching Ren & Stimpy. His paintings feel like forgotten relics from an alternate art history, one where mischievous cartoon figures run amok through classical compositions.
Much like how David Lynch blends the mundane with the uncanny in Twin Peaks, Philjames also thrives on contrast. One of his signature moves is taking the weighty, sepia-toned drama of European painting and dropping a warped, googly-eyed intruder right in the middle of it. The results are both hilarious and unsettling—like waking up inside a Renaissance portrait only to realise you’ve been photobombed by an alternate reality. His work suggests another dimension bleeding into our own, where the familiar is just off-kilter enough to feel like a dream teetering on the edge of a nightmare.
For this new body of work, Philjames pushes his cartoon-laden surrealism into more abstract terrain. The photo-bomb aesthetic of his earlier work gives way to a kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic explosion of colour and movement, punctuated by the ghostly, disembodied hands and paws of familiar cartoon figures. The structured symmetry of his large paintings feel like warped stained-glass windows, but instead of religious motifs, we’re met with swirling, ribbon-like forms and floating gloves that hint at the omnipresent yet unseen body of a Looney Tunes trickster god.
The rigid framework of European painting has melted into a fever dream, shifting from Escher-like tessellations where movement never stops and space folds in on itself to original paintings housed in handmade frames replicated from cartoon backgrounds, as if pulled from their animated worlds into our reality. There’s something distinctly Magritte-esque about this evolution; much like The Lovers (1928) or Golconda (1953), the familiar has been obscured just enough to make us uneasy. His imagery, deeply rooted in animation history now almost function like relics, echoes of a cartoon logic leaking into our consciousness, hinting at a reality just beyond our grasp.
This alternate reality takes centre stage as the familiar and the strange collide in a vibrant contrast of colour that seems to hover on the edge of perception. The surrealists were obsessed with automatic drawing, dreams, and altered consciousness as tools for revealing deeper truths. Writers like André Breton saw hallucinations and drug-induced states as portals to the subconscious. Whether consciously or not, Philjames taps into this lineage with his paintings seeming like glimpses of unseen moments suspended in time; visions where movement never ceases and space refuses to settle.
In the end, Philjames doesn’t just create paintings, he creates portals. They’re wormholes bridging high and low, classical and pop, the grand and the ridiculous. In his past work, this has meant inserting pop culture icons into classical compositions, forcing a collision between high art and mass media. But in his latest work, the fusion is more complete, more immersive. It’s as if the ghosts of cartoon history have taken up residence in a psychedelic chapel, their fragmented forms woven into a hypnotic, almost religious symmetry.
Whether you see his work as a playful trick or a meditation on visual culture, one thing is certain: once you step into Philjames’ world, the boundaries between past and present, high and low, real and imagined begin to dissolve and they won’t reassemble in quite the same way again.
Tony Stephens, 2025
