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PARTISAN REVIEW
earlier works were straightforward and tender, those of the last few
years are more willful. The thrown canvases were expressive of the
"paintness" of paint, its ability to flow, to respond to gravity, to
mutate when color meets color. Poons's newest work deliberately
disrupts these properties. His pale color is imposed on complex
sur~
faces made by collaging crumpled or rolled paper, polyester batting,
foam and the like, so that paint seems less a liquid than
it
does
something trapped, transftxed, suspended . When collaged elements
read too clearly as discrete applied shapes, the pictures can look too
composed or too crafted, but when Poons gets it right , as in the
marvelous
Brahms in Rio,
edges and crumples function as a kind of
sculptural drawing in a sea of insubstantial color. Shifts of tone and
hue work with and against the articulated surface , intensifying and
cancelling actual hollows and ridges.
Color, in most of the recent works, is blonde and light-struck.
Poons's Impressionist palette verges on sweetness , but the gritty,
all–
but-ugly surfaces counteract his slightly cosmetic hues. At the same
time, the delicate colors dissolve surface incrustations , rendering
these intensely physical paintings insubstantial. Mass is made
literal , by the collaged elements , and then abstracted into a purely
visual phenomenon . The dramatic inflections of Poons's paintings of
the last decade anticipate (and criticize) much literally all-inclusive
painting- Schnabel's crockery-studded canvases, for example - but
they are made in a very different spirit. Poons's inclusions are there
not for irony but to make his paintings more present, not to subvert
their painted context but to heighten its expressiveness . There's none
of the cynicism or detachment of many of his younger colleagues.
Poons keeps faith with the tradition of modernism and its belief
in a kind of Platonic ideal, but with an edge. He keeps his viewers
off-balance . You are convinced that if you were only to look hard
enough, the logic of making, the sequence of color would reveal itself
in Poons's recent work. It doesn't. You seize on a small incident - a
cluster of collaged knobs or a particular patch of color-as a point of
reference. It doesn't help . You are swept away by the forceful cur–
rent of the whole. The best pictures refuse to yield to logical analysis
or, in present-day jargon, to "explication." (Quite the contrary,
when structure is too apparent, the paintings suffer) . Yet though
they appear to have been generated by inevitable and unstoppable
forces, Poons's pictures are equally informed by uncompromising
visual intelligence and visual intuition. As real as chunks of the
natural world , they also are evidently the stuff of artiftce ; the
