Deborah Poyn - self-exploration

Deborah Poyn -  self-exploration

Ice Age- 2007, the work which depicts Deborah Poynton in the throes of onanistic self-exploration, is possibly the most riveting of all the paintings, as it goes right to the heart of desire and loss, themes of recurring interest for the artist. The work shows an image of a woman forming a closed, self-sufficient loop of her own body, hand to pubis, eyes closed. Yet the moment unfolds in a deliberately anonymous, ‘institutional space’ that seems to deny tenderness. The inclusion of an ‘Ice Age’ calendar, culled from Poynton’s child’s bedroom, speaks unambiguously of loneliness, and shifts the reading of the figure’s action to one of desperation. This painting recalls a history of related pictures, most readily a number of gouache and watercolour studies by Egon Schiele, in which his depictions of his self-pleasuring are the pictorial antithesis of titillation. The style of Schiele’s images, all scratchy and hastily executed, accords with the content, as he pioneered a foray into self-deprecating abjection. By contrast the laboured quality of Poynton’s image, with its dense thickets of near-obsessive brushwork, seems interested in a far more monumental conceptualisation of this act of self-discovery. Poynton’s style feels, in the best possible sense, like that of a (barely) reformed high school hyperrealist. The myriad areas of detail in her paintings positively clamour for attention. Yet while virtuosity for its own sake may function simply to seduce, the fulcrum of Poynton’s approach is that this verisimilitude exists to explore complex emotional terrain. An almost impenetrable evenness of focus extends across each canvas, lending a disquieting intensity that departs from the photo-real and enters a realm far more psychological than retinal in its interest. – Michael Smith