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PARTISAN REVIEW
force reconsideration not only of our sense of our spatial relationship to
the picture, but also of our initial understanding of its structure.
What's perhaps most striking about the new Circles is their opulence.
Noland uses a recently invented type of paint distinguished by excep–
tionaI luminosity and saturation of color, and a built-in subtle refraction
of complimentary hues. The chemistry, explained to me by its manufac–
turer, is plainly magic, but chemistry is the least of it. What makes the
best of Noland's recent pictures magical-as it always has-is this great
colorist's ability to play on our emotions and tweak our associative pow–
ers by setting intuitively adjusted zones of disparate or closely related
hues side by side. That the pigment he now uses is intensely light-respon–
sive and radiant simply makes his paintings seem more disembodied and
fragile, despite their visual richness and often substantial size.
The circle format allows Noland to concentrate on intervals, amounts
of color, sequences, and visual weights. By acknowledging the center of
the canvas, he implies a point of origin, a reference against which every–
thing else is measured, but the size and proportion of that reference point
varies from picture to picture and the logic of the system is constantly
disrupted by chromatic relationships that alter the tension between the
variously proportioned bands and the supporting rectangle. What might
be, in the hands of a less intuitive, more cautious painter, merely a
respectful homage to Euclid, becomes, instead, an ordered, lucid, but
ultimately mysterious celebration of the delights of the seen. In many of
Noland's new pictures a single intense hue dominates, like a powerful
orchestral chord against which the voices of individual rings of color
make themselves heard. Or
to
change musical analogies, the jazz-loving,
jazz-knowledgeable Noland takes a familiar tune of his own composi–
tion-the circle structure-and plays it like the virtuoso he is, giving it
new harmonies and rhythms, remaining open to the unexpected, and
making the result fresh, exciting, and deeply moving each time.
Larry Poons showed new works at Salander-O'Reilly: exuberant,
expansive, unpredictable paintings that combined colIaged-on elements,
slapdash but assured drawing, and gatherings of nervous, staccato
brushstrokes, all of it put into the service of a palette of chalky, fresco–
like colors, and-as has been true of Poons's pictures of the past few
years-all of it vaguely suggestive of the perceivable world. There was
something speedy, off-hand, and-well-peculiar about these pictures,
at least at first acquaintance, but they insisted that we stay with them
and rewarded time spent. When we gave ourselves up
to
exciting waves
of syncopated color, then half-glimpsed images floated into our con–
sciousness, as though flashed on a screen or seen from a moving car,
