Kevin Larmon came of age in the East
Village '80s, exhibiting his speculative,
subtly abstracted still-lifes at the former
Nature Morte Gallery. Now living in self-
imposed exile in upstate New York, he has
produced an idiosyncratic body of work that
explores the gray area between figuration
and abstraction.
Larmon's new mixed-medium paintings at Curt
Marcus Gallery are like intimate
archeological sites embedded with private
meanings and half-buried objects of desire.
He begins each painting with a collage of
pornography (of the gay male variety) which
he then covers with layer upon layer of
paint, varnish and other incidental
materials (scraps of cloth, drops of blood,
hair, thread) resulting in a bumpy,
blistery, skin-like surface. Filmy white
veils of paint are spread over loose skeins
of gestural pencil lines that circle back
on themselves; erotically charged fragments
of bodies (a finger, a penis, a
bellybutton) sporadically emerge through
the translucent layers.
On one level, the paintings read as lush,
though rather esoteric organic abstractions,
but Larmon's use of a hidden pornographic
substratum forces the Freudian question:
Are these paintings about sexual repression?
And the answer, I think, is no. These
smallish, often square canvases have a
sensual immediacy and intimate physicality that often recall some of Robert
Ryman's smaller works. If Larmon's seductive,
lovingly worked surfaces conceal more
blatantly erotic imagery, the effect is
closer to striptease than to censorship.
The thematic content of the paintings is
similarly recondite, sometimes hinted at in
the titles, sometimes not. Anatomy and
Fascism draws an intuitive parallel between
the idealization of the male body and the
culture of fascism, incorporating photographs
of Mussolini's neoclassical Olympic stadium
outside of Rome. Shirt features an embedded
scrap of red flannel, an allusion to the
coded uniform of Christopher Street
cruisers in the late '70s (when Larmon
first arrived in New York). In Untitled
(Pandemic) the subject is weightier and the
symbolism more overt--pasted-on letters
spelling out the word "pandemic" are
surrounded by stains of dried blood.
The pencil drawings on wood in the small
gallery look like Larmon's paintings with a
few layers of crusty skin peeled off. The
forms are biomorphic and protean (like
something a Surrealist might dream) and
they're precisely rendered with a fluid,
eloquent line.
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