Larry Poons

By: Archie Rand 

"Another word for creativity is courage"

       - Matisse

Ang Lee said the greatest creative gift an artist can have is indecision.  

An artist lives in limbo, floating offshore. In sight is a ledge, dry and stable where other artists gather to have martinis, smoke cigarettes, flirt or kill time with chatter. A seductive community resort, it is always within reach should the artist want reprieve from indecision. This place has a name. It is called "style". 

Style is a cloak behind which one removes the chance of slipping up, exposing a more interior dialogue. Oscar Wilde said that the trouble with being understood is that they find you out. Style is the intercessor that keeps the prying from your privates. It is imperious silence draped in aesthetics.

"Silence is the lid on the garbage can" 

        - Gilbert Sorrentino

The costuming of style is unknown to Larry Poons. His work is ruthlessly, embarrassingly, honest. It pleads for admission only to be faced with a jury that can't process its integrity. He is amazingly prolific. Poons' paintings embody what Francis Bacon, referring to Picasso, called, "the brutality of fact". 

A clutch of academic idiots who codify stuff want footnotes.  Precedent.  Artist's statements. Parroting a meagre diet of sanctioned recipes, they insist that a validating link will weld evolutionary provenance to an artwork. In timidity and arrogance contextualization is subpoenaed so that the art at which they must look bears proof of its fitness for consideration. Aesthetic narcolepsy has created a demand for meaningless spectacle whose confections serve fealty to selected paradigms. But the shame of an unadulterated approach to image humiliates the narcissism of the college trained viewer. Because…in their honor-hungry cupidity, they might, God forbid… be wrong.

"If your art looks like art it must be someone else's art"

        - Chuck Close

Avoiding curtsies to the qualifying niceties indulged by most painters Larry Poons' work doesn't absorb comfortably. To how much Jungian surrender must we succumb? Come, enter the conversation.