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Llyn Foulkes is one of the major artists of his generation to emerge from the Southern California maelstrom of natural beauty, crass commercialism, poetic free thought and riot-prone anger. As a painter, Foulkes has often drawn upon such sources as old postcards and stereographs as compositional devices. He has also borrowed from these same photographic sources (as well as from film) a serial presentation format, and developed paint application techniques that reference the automatic and seamless qualities of photographic tone and shading. (“I wanted [each painting] to look like a photograph and I denied the surface,” he told an interviewer in 1974.)¹

Foulkes is also well known for the assemblage sculpture that was his first entry into the art world in the early l960s. Like many assemblagists, Foulkes was attracted to the vestigial pathos of old photographs and used them extensively in his work. No other artist, however, has so skirted the brink of obsession with the photograph-as-relic.

In uncounted works from two periods in particular, the early 1960s and early 1970s, Foulkes painted and added collage elements to found, anonymous portraits. Often these are nineteenth century cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards, typical small-format pictures of the kind commonly found in old albums. The photographs are Foulkes’s Everyman (the portraits are frequently of men) in a hundred repetitions of the same pose: stoic and dignified, even as he is subjected to horrible indignities. He is canceled, crucified, negated. The reference to blood—bright red overpainting—is common. (“I’d been in a mortuary once and saw a corpse with the skin cut from its skull and the top of his head and flipped back over his face—his hair hanging down over his eyes. It was so horrible I laughed.”)²

Geometry Teacher, 1974, is the image of humankind blinded by its rationalization of nature. Not a fragment of photographic paper is apparent, because the paint has been applied so heavily, yet the photograph’s presence underlies the object like a soul snatched and imprisoned by some voodoo camera. A scale or ruler—the Measure of the Man—borders the figure and contains it. Most frustrating, the figure, a melted blob of a man, faces us from the back of a frame, as if to tell us that it is we who are trapped in a world of artifice, behind a picture plane observed by a monstrous universe.

1. Sandy Ballatore, “An Interview with Llyn Foulkes,” in Llyn Foulkes (Newport Beach, CA: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1974), n.p. ↩︎
2. ibid. ↩︎