A powerful visual assault, Random Illusion No. 2 immediately captivates the viewer, compelling them to explore the composition further. The second in a series of seven large scale works, painted by Phillips between 1968-69, they all share the same name and are numbered consecutively. As the title suggests, the incongruous objects, motifs and grids all appear to be randomly set against the black ground, seemingly with no relationship to one another they compete for attention. Two sides the canvas are bordered by rainbow coloured plexiglass, which like the neon lights used by advertiser’s, stops the viewer in their tracks, demanding attention. Illusion in the title refers to the trompe-l’oeil effect created by the exquisite detail in which Phillips depicts the objects as he shows off his full range of skills. He was one of the most talented artists of a peer group that included David Hockney, Allen Jones and Patrick Caulfield, all of whom famously emerged from the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s to change the face of British art.

On closer inspection, the motifs in Random Illusion No. 2 are not as arbitrary as one might think and when the series is examined as a whole, the compositional elements reappear in one form or another. Phillips divided the motifs into different categories and then randomly selected each motif within a category to be used in each painting. Like Schwitters and Duchamp, Phillips explored the idea of random selection and the elevation of everyday objects from so-called ‘low art’ to ‘high art’. The images Phillips uses are transposed directly from reproductions he saw. The eagle is taken from an illustration by John James Audubon in The Birds of America, 1965; the engine is likely to be taken from Autocar magazine and the geometric objects from a scientific journal. Their positioning within the composition is anything but random and was painstakingly mapped out so the component parts coherently relate to one another. Their machine-like finish is accentuated by the use of an airbrush, which at the time was more commonly used to paint cars and motorbikes. The billboard sized scale of Random Illusion No. 2, with appropriated everyday imagery enclosed by rainbow coloured plexiglass, makes this work a quintessential manifestation of the Pop idiom.
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