Karen Wilkin
AT THE GALLERIES
In
the last decade, painting has turned itself inside out.
From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, painters strove to
dissolve the flat planes of walls and panels and canvases to create po–
tent illusions of space and depth. After the Impressionists, and
especially after Cezanne, the plane declared itself more frankly;
Renaissance perspective was more or less reversed as painted forms
appeared to press forward into the viewer's space. More recently, the
unavoidable flat surface of the canvas has often been made into a
virtue, a significant element in stripped-down abstraction, but since
about 1980, painters seem to have yearned for tangible physical sub–
stance, not just declarative flatness. From Frank Stella's aggressive
painted reliefs to the literal-minded inclusions of David Salle and
company, we are surrounded by works where actual projection is of
paramount importance. It's enough to make you believe in a zeit–
geist.
Even artists whose work defined the pristine, uninflected char–
acter of painting in the sixties and seventies have been affected by
the new desire for tactility. Lawrence Poons, for example, first at–
tracted attention with his meticulously painted "dot" pictures of the
1960s, luminous fields punctuated by unpredictably placed spots of
color. About 1970, he began to pour or, more accurately, to "throw"
his paintings, to make complex orchestrations of colored rivulets.
Since about 1980, Poons's work has become more and more robust
and, at the same time, more and more visually elusive, as his lyrical
waterfalls of color have been made to fight it out with richly articu–
lated surfaces . His most recent work, the tough, uningratiating and
beautiful canvases shown last September at the Andre Emmerich
Gallery, made him seem (among other things) like the quintesentially
1980s painter. Of course, it's not simply a question of surface.
Poons's new pictures are disquieting even when they are most seduc–
tive, hard to pin down, a little unstable, "dislocated" in the way
eighties art is said to be. (They are hard paintings to write about.
Because the experience is so intensely visual, which is not to say
mindless, language seems even more inadequate than usual). As
they have been since the 1970s, Poons's new paintings are continu–
ous modulated expanses of similarly valued colors,
b~t
where the
