Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Larry Poons
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
Chicago, IL: EXPO Chicago (Yares Art’s Booth)
85%
Untitled. 1971. Acrylic on canvas
So the bottom half of this painting is raw brown canvas and the top half (or half-plus) is that thick disgusting variegated splooge. On the one hand it's a painting about what paintings are — streaky shit layered, sometimes piled, on top of something flat. But for being so basic, it's not exactly simple. It looks like Poons dripped his acrylics — and man are they acrylics, all plasticky and hard — down the face of the canvas, which he then inverted, such that there's this upward trajectory to the whole thing, like the paint is trying to pull itself off of the painting's surface. It's an open question as to whether there's any order to the streaks and the splatter, or whether there's instead a deliberate disorder that serves to emphasize the elemental binary that exists between paint and the surface it's on. (This is one thing that differentiates Poons from Pollock, whom Clement Greenberg, in an interview, once called Apollonian.) What's not an open question is whether the Easter tones of the paint are impossible to square with the ochre of the raw canvas — they are, and that’s good. The lengths Poons had to go to to achieve such impossibilities were extreme: this is the position painting found itself when this painting was made. (2025)
Chicago, IL: EXPO Chicago (Yares Art’s Booth)
74%
Eliza James. 2024. Acrylic on canvas
Poons is a total freak for painting like this in 2024, at almost 90 years old. There's so little propriety here, whether with respect to the history of the medium or to the way art functions a quarter of the way through the 21st century. What's really beyond the pale is the impasto, which isn't just inches thick in places but actually fucking gleams in this impish sort of way. One could spend hours mapping out all the color relations and whether they do or don't pull the painting towards some kind of coherence — there's the grayish purples that recur bottom left and bottom right, the umbers that soften the hot pink, the general centrifugation out from the central yellow — but to do that would be to miss the main point: that this is a base, dirty, corporal painting that has much more to do with taking a shit than with Fra Angelico. But maybe that's the rub, because in a fundamental way this thing, despite how "there" it is, always falls back to being a painting in the last estimation; it's not some intermedial chimera, it's a picture! Poons (and this goes on in the late Olitski, too) seems to be interested in using the things that in his lifetime have threatened the sanctity, even the possibility, of painting as a medium as themselves means of reaffirming the necessity of painting. Grossness, for Poons, is what paintings have to confront to be paintings at all. (And then there’s that title! Like, c’mon Larry, it’s a portrait? — crazy.) (2025)