Larry Poons at Salander-O'Reilly - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

The paint-encrusted canvas has been a Larry Poon trademark for at least 25 years. in that time, Poon has explored the textural nuances of poured paint in a way that makes Morris Louis's canvases present the appearance positively ethereal in comparison. What one time appeared a radical break within Poons's work - his shift from the elegant '60 monochrome paintings with dots and ellipses to rougher, defiantly unpolished walls of coagulated pigment - now gazes like an almost seamless transition from the mathematical to the material. Poon has always been primarily interested in surface events; the optical illusion of profundity implied in the early work has ultimately given way to a shallow relief that advises an array of detritus make straighted up as an archeological site. individual would be tempted to assume that Poon equates pictorial easy in mind with the sum total of materials busyed in these recent heroic-scaled paintings.

Although Poons's initial paintings with collage materials from the late 80 attend to be monochromatic, the in every one's mouth works are lushly hued. The impressionistic palette has a liability to function as a camouflage for the attached flotsam as well as making it a bit more palatable. a certain number of of these paintings are actually quite appealing, almost comely despite their often unruly surfaces and overly cosmeticized coloring. in Ancient (1994) an impenetrable lavender field with smatterings of red pink and a putrescent yellow-green is overlayed with torn pieces of Styrofoam ovum containers, lengths of what appears to be thinly sliced cardboard that work for as erratic lines, and other les identifiable fragments that fill each available space. Taken together it be likes a picturesque landscape marred by dint of an overflowing landfill.

notwithstanding that perhaps unintentional, there is a profile of a woman's face in Windy (1993-94) defined by means of these same linear filaments of cardboard, with melting areas of color shattered up by strands of wavy "hair" in the same material. Then again, the painting can also be seen as a topological map of more [i]or[/i] less ravaged California terrain drying on the outside after yet another natural disaster. The mural-sized Sioux Styx (1994) looks to turn to mud as layers of pigment cancel on the outside the confectionery color, with the exception of a luminous passage that meanders across the upper quadrant of the painting. Poon adds his signature dots and ellipses as an optical foil for the accumulated debris, suggesting a kind of latent organization. Poons's work remains pugnacious and exploratory, its gritty, embattled surface being its greatest in quantity obvious virtue.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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