Earnest and theatrical, the relief paintings of Los Angeles artist Llyn Foulkes seem out of place in today's coolly deadpan art world. Foulkes himself is cantankerous and willfully eccentric; his goals, however, are impossible to dismiss. He employs instantly recognizable imagery and visceral effects to convey a dark vision of American culture in trouble. With sources ranging from Bellini and Donatello to Dali and Disney, he seeks nothing less than to reinvigorate painting with the moral seriousness of Renaissance religious art.
A full-scale retrospective, curated by Marilu Knode and sponsored by the L.A. Fellows of Contemporary Art, is currently touring the country. Its title describes the uneasy niche the artist has carved out for himself: "Llyn Foulkes: Between a Rock and a Hard Place." With puritanical fervor, Foulkes has taken on American corruption as a personal burden. He sees our national soullessness epitomized in the Disney corporation's squeaky-clean symbol, Mickey Mouse. For Foulkes, the mass-marketing of Disney-style culture is a sign of the emptiness that permeates American society.
Although he is best known for his 1960s Pop paintings that recall large-scale postcards of desert landscapes, Foulkes repudiated the Pop movement in 1969 and continues to rail against its flat, thin images. "Pop art killed painting," he says. "I know because it nearly killed me." He settled on the neglected medium of relief painting as the best way to lure viewers deep into the illusionistic space of pictures. With protruding architectural moldings and receding details dug into his wood-panel paintings, Foulkes envelops viewers in his cartoonlike tableaux and self-portraits. His incorporation of real fabrics, objects and photographs into the reliefs seems less a nod to assemblage than a desire for heightened realism and tactile immediacy. In Pop (1990) - a self-portrait of the artist as a traumatized suburban Superman - the depressing banality of the venetian blinds, plush paisley upholstery, cheap den paneling and motel carpeting perfectly set the tone for Foulkes's epic/ironic theme: the impotence of the stymied superhero.
Although Foulkes runs the risk of making simplistic political art, his background in Abstract-Expressionist painting has grounded his work with a strong sense of visual complexity. In 1961, only two years after attending Chouinard Art Institute, Foulkes had his first one-man show at L.A.'s Ferus Gallery. As seen in the current traveling exhibition, these early paintings, which incorporate photographs as well as collaged objects with charred and molten textures, remain remarkably inventive and conceptually varied. Attuned to the antiformalist esthetic of the times, Foulkes made use of the painterly qualities of assemblage elements. Flanders (1961-62) employs a delicately melted plastic tarp to evoke a war-torn landscape of the First World War. In Memory of St. Vincent's School (1960) transforms an unadorned school chair and a found charred blackboard bearing a scrawled swastika into a devastating antiwar statement.
Many of the early works are structured like Renaissance altarpieces, with side panels and predellalike rows of images. Made the same year as Jasper Johns's first map painting, Geography Lesson (1960) features five serial images of a desert landscape above a sprawling mass of old personal letters. The letters are loosely laid out in the shape of a U.S. map and covered with a thin layer of gray paint, evoking an American geography shaped by dark, lost communiques. Painted on a found children's blackboard, Preview (1961) includes a virtuosic, winglike swoop of paint flanked by two textured gray panels, each featuring a fabulously scribbled figure. Dedicated to Foulkes's grandmother, Ode to Muddie (1962) uses two stunningly dripped figures as side panels that complement an ambiguous central form made by pressing paint-soaked rags onto the canvas.
Foulkes slipped into his Pop phase in 1963 with the guileless, beautifully textured Cow - painted, he is quick to point out, two years before Warhol's famous bovine wallpaper. But Foulkes's best-known Pop paintings were large-scale depictions of desert and rock landscapes that hint at existential angst. With the words "This painting is dedicated to the American" handwritten across its top and side, Death Valley, U.S.A. (1963) is a typically bleak evocation of a cultural and historical void. Although Foulkes's Pop landscapes effectively capture a sense of new-world anti-utopia, the artist felt constrained by the paintings' serial imagery and reductive content. In 1969, although his work was receiving considerable attention, he stopped painting.
Four years later, when he started to experiment again in his studio, Foulkes blotted out the face of a self-portrait with an angry swatch of blood-red paint; he painted a gray mask over the top of the head to embellish the sense of blind, directionless rage. The horror-show self-revelation of this work, Who's on Third (1971-73), rekindled Foulkes's interest in visual art. His ongoing series of transgressive portraits skewers the sanctity of formal portraiture with a gory Dadaist energy. He explodes the public facades of patriarchal businessmen, military leaders, bureaucrats and art officials, stripping away their faces to reveal the rot within.
With its echoes of Heartfield and Hoch, such social comment might seem overly familiar. But Foulkes's highly crafted surfaces are energized by his unpredictable use of collage elements. The open-shirted subject of The Crucifixion (1985) is a hare-lipped man whose mutilated face is partly obscured by a torn-out image of a medieval suffering Christ. The violence of the subject's disfigurement seems both mirrored in the applied image and somehow caused by it. This ambiguity defines Foulkes's moral complexity; corruption can come both from within and without.
In That Old Black Magic (1985), the subject's dark face features a cancerous nose literally eaten into the panel and eyes collaged from two large stick-on zeros. The painting is framed by an expanse of blackboard on which are visible stick figures and the lyrics of the title ballad in smudged chalk. Presaging the work of Gary Simmons, Foulkes uses the smudged chalkboard as a metaphoric medium to explore racial stereotypes and mass culture's all-pervasive imprint. The brutal intensity of the picture, however, points to a deeper indictment of humanity itself. There are no innocent victims in Foulkes's world.
In the 1980s Foulkes began extending his social commentary to a wider arena. The tableau relief Made in Hollywood (1983) introduces the key opponent in his ongoing moral struggle. Mounted in this large piece is a toy revolver that points directly at a photograph of Foulkes's own preteen children. Below the gun is a copy of a 1934 document that lays bare the insidious rationale behind Disney's founding of the Mickey Mouse Club, described as "an easily arranged and inexpensive method of getting and holding the patronage of youngsters." The club pledge might be seen as a kind of perverse mantra for Foulkes, unexpectedly revealing the roots of his own quest for meaning in his art: "I will be a square shooter in my home, in school, on the playground, wherever I may be."
Other tableaux offer twisted takes on pop-culture heroes and myths. The Last Outpost (1983) is a loopy but frightening allegory in which a '50s TV character, the Lone Ranger, has been gunned down; we see him lying prostrate before a homesteader woman with the head of Mickey Mouse. Where Did I Go Wrong? (1991) presents Clark Kent in a desert setting, reading a newspaper announcing the first air raids of the Gulf War. With his Superman outfit visible beneath his business suit, Kent seems Foulkes's alter ego, pondering his hapless, hopeless role as a moral arbiter in an already blasted world.
Although all of his portraits have autobiographical elements, self-portraiture became more prominent in Foulkes's work in 1990 with Pop, the first of a number of ambitious tableaux. In The New Renaissance (1991) Foulkes depicts himself as a blindfolded pleinair painter who paints the Chinese character for "man," oblivious to both the beautiful coastal landscape and the startling apparition of the crucified Christ on a telephone pole. We see Foulkes's wife (a psychoanalyst in real life) as a ghostly presence at his side, reading to him from a volume titled The Human Condition.
