Loretta Howard Gallery is pleased to present Larry Poons: Choral Fantasy. Combining a body of seldom exhibited paintings from the 1970s and 1980s, the exhibition highlights the artist's selective use of color in order to explore the way we perceive light. The large-scale, closely hued paintings on view have a landscape inspired quality. Accompanied by a text from renowned scholar Mary Ann Caws, the exhibition invites the viewer to appreciate the works on view in terms of two of the artist’s most prominent influences, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy (Opus. 80.)
Caws writes:
Nothing about Larry Poons’ venture feels small. No less powerful than a symphony or harmony or, then, a fantasy. This painter orchestrates, and largely. Something continues resounding. Let me posit that it is the roughness of the layering, even in the knobbly-textured and spattered paintscapes. You can sense the gesture and its, yes, violence; you can feel the thrown-ness of the paint, from the body itself. Something is racing still, underneath. Poons himself states how he is always wanting to do something he hasn’t done before, but here it is for us also in this exposition: every time we reconfront a piece, it is different.