Untitled, 1961

​In
John Altoon’sUntitled,the wobbly
black outlines of phallic forms overflow with wildly nonrepresentational colors—anatomically
incorrect greens, whites, blacks, and oranges. The messy, fleshy quality of these
bright, abstract splashes adds to the bawdy, hedonistic tone of the work. Here
Altoon navigates his dual impulses toward abstraction and an erotically charged
mode of figuration. The work aligns pleasure in the aesthetic realm—color,
texture, and shape--with sexual, sensuous, or bodily pleasure. When Altoon came
of age as an artist in the 1950s, abstract expressionism was the dominant mode
of painting in the United States. In this work he counters its high-minded
rhetoric of inner turmoil and anxious struggle with a more casual, even
cartoonish, painterly engagement.