Larry Poons began painting hard-edge dots at the outset. Later, he developed a genuinely immersive Color Field approach. His current show at Yares Art, One for Baby, takes a different approach, but these are some of his best works in decades. This series of paintings holds together intensely gestural, color-based collisions made by throwing and pouring paint. Even so, Poons’s subtle brushwork finds its way into a place where maintenance of color depicts stillness in a place of perfection. At the same time, some of the paintings reveal vigorous markings that see their order regained while openly awakened from one to another. 

The artist Larry Poons has been recognized over the years by major critics as a multi-disciplinary rebel in the New York art world. His status as a painter began to emerge when Poons began painting hard-edge dots on fields of color in the early 1960s. This culminated in a series of works pre-dating his deeply gestural, color-based collisions, from which he would eventually instigate throwing and pouring paint in a highly personal manner. This would become apparent in the early 70s and continue  throughout the 80s and beyond. 

"If only we could make paintings that look as good as the paint,” Larry Poons once said to me as he contemplated a bucket of unnameable hues loosely swirled together. He sounded wistful, but he fulfilled that ambition many times over during his long life as a painter—and has been recognized for that achievement.

In some way, The Outerlands at Yares Art New York picks up where the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition left off, more than fifty years later. This museum-worthy show contains thirty-one large canvases in acrylic and mixed media, and nine works on paper, spanning the early eighties up to this year. Coinciding with the publication of the first-ever comprehensive career monograph on the artist, Poons, published by Abbeville Press (to which I contributed an essay), the exhibition traces Poons’s evolution beyond hard-edge abstraction, Ab Ex and Color Field. 

At Yares Art, on Fifth Avenue 34 blocks south of the Jewish Museum, we have two eminently satisfactory exhibitions of more recent abstract art. The first is "Larry Poons/Frank Stella: As It Was/As It Is." The second is "Fields of Color III"(both through July 31).  They afford a contrast that parallels my own development as a writer on abstraction. The first show equates to a period before I'd awakened to abstraction, and before I'd met either artist.  The second represents a period after I'd met them both, and after Bill Rubin had sensitized me to abstraction--though much of the work in it was also done prior to the spring of 1968 (when Rubin effected this sensitization).

Exhibition running through Oct. 27. Yares Art, East 57th Street, Manhattan; 212-256-0969, yaresart.com.