| An onomatopoeia is a word that imitates the sound it represents. It’s the kind of thing writers—especially poets—are always trying to scratch out on paper, because it’s a primary tool of their craft. Remarkably, onomatopoeia is also how Jennifer Poon paints. Her brushstrokes on paper look and feel like what they are—simple, precise, striated overlappings of watercolor—which suddenly penetrate below figurative representation, shimmering into shifting, interior revelations on the conflicting ideas, exaltation, and fears that comprise individual beings. |  |
Zane Fischer is a freelance arts and culture writer, based in Santa Fe,
New Mexico.
Jennifer Poon’s work was on view at Claire Oliver Gallery
in New York in April.
An onomatopoeia is a word that imitates the sound it represents. It’s the kind of thing writers—especially poets—are always trying to scratch out on paper, because it’s a primary tool of their craft. Remarkably, onomatopoeia is also how Jennifer Poon paints. Her brushstrokes on paper look and feel like what they are—simple, precise, striated overlappings of watercolor—which suddenly penetrate below figurative representation, shimmering into shifting, interior revelations on the conflicting ideas, exaltation, and fears that comprise individual beings.
On a basic level, color and shading in Poon’s work vacillate between a fluid description of tones, and a web of visual secrets and hidden half-images encoded into the musculature of the body. Its metaphysical dissection of the real within the material effuses a satisfying, Platonic logic. The twist is that any intellectual or moral didacticism is a red herring. To leave Poon’s content at that level would be to admire the potency of her technique and all that may be inferred from it, at the neglect of her effectiveness as an artist.
In her routine painting of the female body (both pre-pubescent and mature) in juxtaposition with varied animal and inanimate elements (and, increasingly three-dimensional elements), Poon’s work parallels that of a number of contemporaries, skilled in illustration and lexicons of personal and social symbology, including Fay Ku and Peregrine Honig. But in her increasing maturity of emotive expression—void of morality or of imperative outcome—Poon provokes solidarity with Marlene Dumas, in particular her oil on canvas and ink on paper work from the mid 1980s through the late 1990s. For both artists, whether a single work tends toward portraiture or more complex compositions of interpersonal dynamics with multiple figures, there is a subtle, yet forceful demand upon the viewer to complete the scenario. The purely forensic potential that each painter lays out is as challenging as it is enthralling. As with any modern era figurative painter who explores violence, ambiguity, and irony, there is an extrapolation of ideas descended from Goya. Even so, painters like Dumas and Poon are adept at settling a contemporary frame over such dramatic filtration of the human condition. Poon’s intense, yet intentionally undefined outlay of bodies and relationships, creates a cocktail of uncertainty, angst, and curiosity that sets her into a rarified air among art’s emotional provocateurs.
Equally rare is the extent to which Poon’s work is ultimately her own. Despite clear synergies with other artists, her work is technically and stylistically distinct. The sparsity of her strokes and the plain evidence of the artist’s hand—her wet, color-laden brush could almost be a pencil—conspire to build a narrative of each work’s process that provides encouragement to further exploration. The use of fabrics, and other tactile materials, whether as complementary forms and symbols or as additional surfaces and layers on paper, extends Poon’s layered storytelling and her perilous balance of elements and urges. Her teetering play between technical composition and contextual, emotive implications sits, itself, in a kind of balance between abandon and constraint; everything is there for the taking, if only just. Logic and appetite refuse to contradict each other, but rather sit in blithe proximity, leaving it incumbent on the viewer to summon enough courage to pierce the tension—the uneasy truce—that Poon leaves coiled in every work.
