Pools of Radiance

What can an artist do with a dot? A lot --if he is Larry Poons. His works are gigantic fields of solid color, spangled with hard-edged dots; when gazed at for any length of time, they seem to dance out and surround the viewer. They have served Poons very well indeed. His canvases have been snapped up, and his six one-man shows have all been sellouts, although his prices range up to $6,000. Still only 31, Poons has become a prodigy of the Manhattan art world, but he clearly has no intention of resting on his reputation. His newest canvases, now on view at Manhattan's Castelli Gallery, display a totally new style (see color opposite).

For most of his career, Poons has been heavily influenced by his musical training. He started out as a guitar player with a high school hillbilly band in Queens, N.Y. Next he studied at Boston's New England Conservatory of Music for two years, then switched to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (he still plays the guitar as a hobby). His earliest paintings were hard-edged and geometric attempts to present Bach's counterpoint in visual terms. When Poons moved to New York in 1958, he discovered Mondrian--in particular, the syncopated squares of Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie.

Like Mondrian, Poons sketched his designs on lined paper, but developed his own style of round dots that bounced gaily about on a field of contrasting color in carefully coordinated and nonrepeating rhythms. Next, he began to add elliptical dots to the round ones in order to orchestrate his scores with anywhere from two to nine different colors. East India Jack, a sprightly hornpipe, plays off three sprays of round green dots against four of elliptical blue dots and a spattering of purple ones.

When a colleague in 1960 pointed out that the dots, like those of the op painters, induced afterimages, Poons labored for 18 months to eliminate the effect. In his newest paintings, he has thrown away the sketch pad and the crisp little musical notations altogether.

The result is a series of melancholy pools of radiance. For some time, Poons' dots have been growing larger and more transparent. Now, in addition, he creates a varied, blotchy background by pouring his paint directly onto a canvas spread on the floor, then sweeping the color around with a broom.

Why has he moved into this new, rawly emotional phase? Poons imperturbably prefers to let his paintings speak for themselves, saying only, "It's curiosity that motivates me." Nonetheless, Night Journey, one of his most radical paintings, says something more. The title is taken from Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation. To Koestler, the artist exists on a trivial plane of daily existence, but he must descend to a harrowing private Hades if he is to find fresh inspiration. Koestler quotes Sir Thomas Browne that "man is 'that great and true amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not only like other creatures in diverse elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds.' " Night Journey seems to have reminded Poons of two such divided worlds. One is a sun lit, sandy sea inhabited by bright-colored forms, the other a smoggy pink one in which one lonely bacterium floats.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.