And on the seventh day, the Mattel factory burned to the ground and Chace Crawford rose from the ashes like the most perfect Ken Doll gleaming in the sun.

• 

Artwork by Richard Phillips
Captions by Michael K
Text by Aimee Walleston
Contributing art editor Dominic Sidhu
All imaging services Industrial Color

I see a rainbow and I want to paint it black. Men experience a curious mix of love and hate when they look at images of their celebrity brethren. They see the person they want to be and the competitor they want to destroy. Richard Phillips is known for his figurative paintings of high-gloss surface glamour fraught with questions of fame, power, and commerce. In his newest work, “Most Wanted,” commissioned exclusively by VMAN, Phillips sheds new light on some of America’s most recognized faces. Like the phases of the moon, Phillips’s portraits illustrate the temporal stages in the lives of the most in-demand male celebrities.

In these portraits, the subjects stand in front of “step-and-repeat” backdrops, the staged red carpet photo-op settings supplied by advertisers sponsoring premieres and events. Actors get press coverage by being photographed in front of walls plastered with sponsor logos. Sponsors get their brands blessed by the power of celebrity. By reinterpreting these photographs (which Phillips describes as “utterly worthless, and completely harnessed to commerce”) in pastel, Phillips has effectively brought each of these famous men into the realm of sorcery. The medium recalls ancient cave painting, where our ancestors used abstract depiction to conjure the essence of what they drew. The gestural quality makes these boys more touchable than the camera ever could, and more real, yet their poses and the Easter egg colored backdrops retain an implacable otherness. They remain above and beyond us still.

This tension seems integral to Philips’s intricately-wrought conceptual framework for the piece. “There is funny double play with this work,” the artist explains. “It’s a come-on. I’m literally inviting you up to show you my pastels.” By depicting sought-after celebrities, Phillips is repositioning power roles. What if a Versace step-and-repeat wall is truly a distillation of the ‘fuck all y’all glamour’ of Versace? What if, in front of it, Zac Efron becomes not just a teen fantasy item for sale, but the very thing his identity purports him to be—the boy every American boy wants to be; good and maybe a little bad, American to the core without a hint of pretension, and  doubling over with raw ambition (to match his lady love’s naked ambition)? He is Zac Efron, with the mystical magic of Versace glamour to back him up.

Who we cannot be—scratch that, who we do not allow ourselves to be—becomes totemic to us. In our strange, animal hearts, we choose pretty young men as our leaders. We make our beautiful actors into gods only to shove them in front of step-and-repeats so that they become indistinguishable from the advertised product scrawled behind them. And then a question gets raised: to what end does it behoove a young man to have that particular label behind him? “Pick me, LV, for your next campaign—don’t we look gorgeous together?” And what happens to these pictures of icons leaning against icons? They disappear into pixel dust—forgotten upon sight and remaining as a ghostly archive on Perez or Dlisted (the fame bashing/worshipping blog whose editor lovingly captioned each portrait).

The minutes that tick by in our lives often matter far less than we hoped they would. By this standard, the moments we imagine our stars living must live up to expectations we could never fulfill for ourselves. Our culture strives to apply meaning to the meaningless—and the development of a consistently successful pose at the step-and-repeat can exist as a code for a beautiful life. What is stardom but a private trailer and an assistant handing you a fresh towel? Perhaps what they truly shed light on is the collective, willful naïveté in believing that those distinctions can be so easily parsed.