To start at the end, Keith Puccinelli’s fascinating posthumous show POOCH: The Art Full Life of Keith Julius Puccinelli ends its story with a vision of the artist’s own death. Wending back through the UCSB Art, Design & Architecture (AD&A) Museum to its deepest gallery, we come across the grimly witty piece “Yet Another Dead Motherfucker,” an image of a clown corpse that is, true to this artist’s form, beautifully drawn across several large pieces of paper and bigger than life and death.
The image might be more startling if we weren’t regularly prepared by the exhibition leading up to this point. The story — and the critical backstory — of Puccinelli’s art is conveyed outside the museum entrance. The drawing “3 Men with Tongues,” seen in its original small scale inside the museum, has been radically enlarged and serves as an epic poster, underscoring his familiar motif of exposed tongues. Puccinelli’s diagnosis of tongue cancer in 1997 ultimately ended his life in 2016, but it was also a motivating force for his prolific plunge into art-making in his later years, a fruitful second chapter of an artistic life that began with his highly successful work as a graphic artist.
For one signature touch, he gravitated toward the doppelgänger figure of the clown, spun from the proximity of his name to the commedia dell’arte Pulcinella, a tragic jester figure. Hence, the pithy nickname “Pooch.”
