BonnardAffinities2018

stir our emotions, our associations, and our intellect, wordlessly and

eloquently. Poons’s recent paintings test the limits of our vision. They

demand that we give ourselves over to their swirling, pulsing skeins

and sweeps of disjunctive chroma, often applied in seductive, varied

gestures against washes of thin, luminous hues, the way Renaissance

Venetian painters worked against warm grounds. Poons’s clusters of

strokes are as unstable as breaking surf. They can seem to fray apart, co-

alesce momentarily, and then shift into new configurations. These mes-

merizing paintings are unequivocally personal, but at the same time,

they seem to honor such precedents as Jackson Pollock’s all-over poured

and dripped expanses, Claude Monet’s ambiguous evocations of water,

reflections, and waterlilies, and Bonnard’s scintillating color. It’s as if

Poons were exploring the unrealized implications of all of these artists’

work, internalizing them, and using them as the basis for a newly in-

vented, fresh, and personal kind abstraction celebrating the expressive

potency of color and light.

Both Jackie Saccoccio and Cecily Kahn have co-opted the force of grav-

ity, among other things, as a drawing tool—as Poons did in his thrown

paintings of the

1970

s and

1980

s—but the results are more delicate

and intimate. Both women explore the ability of liquid paint to flow