Michael Reafsnyder by Miles McEnery Gallery

MICHAEL REAFSNYDER

AMERINGER McENERY YOHE

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com

UNIVERSAL GRAMMARS By Michelle Grabner There are deeply human contradictions at work in Michael Reafsnyder’s impasto abstractions: Pleasurable ontological debates are aroused out of the ironic fullness of his superabundant acrylic compositions. Epic clashes between sign and gesture steadfastly excite classical ruminations on the nature of painting and humanism. Grounded in the psychological complications associated with the age-old mind-body problem, Reafsnyder’s painting is disruptive and critical. Evoking Raphael’s School of Athens (1509–1511) is appropriate when considering the philosophical thrust of Reafsnyder’s work. And so are the existential abstractions of the New York School and the interrupted energies intrinsic to postmodernism. The principle wrangle in Reafsnyder’s paintings is between intellectual cognition and emotion. Pulling back far enough, one can see that his paintings mischievously pit the body against the mind, the hand of the painter against the head of the artist, the material world against the world of ideas. In front of Reafsnyder’s paintings, I am always catching myself asking if the work is eliciting my affections or playing to my intellect? The bigger question, which ultimately leads to an intellectual crisis, is why can’t he be playing at both? That’s because we may understand the mind-body dichotomy to be false, but it is theoretically alive and urgent in Reafsnyder’s paintings. The artist himself, an entanglement of romantic visionary, pataphysician, and wry appropriationist, dares us to tease apart notions of creative originality and our own struggles with Cartesian dualism. It is a deep and sophisticated project, especially since it hinges on cultural clichés, archetypes, and a universal grammar of expressive aggrandizement.

Reafsnyder’s overly gestural abstractions, which are built from excess quantities of acrylic paint, host discrete and often small graphic depictions of the ubiquitous smiley face. In his paintings, the unoriginal meme—likely derived from ancient ritual—is at odds with the seismic painterly activity that provides the background to this linguistic motif. Squeezed directly from the paint tube, the thin acrylic lines that swiftly delineate the familiar dotted eyes and upturned mouths are often hidden within the colorful sweeps of paint covering the surface of the canvas. Once these disarming devices are discovered clinging to Reafsnyder’s gesticulating abstract fields, there is no going back. Understanding the painting simply as a contemporary abstraction is no longer possible. The smiley face corrupts the possibility of original expression. The absurdly physical full-spectrum abstractions are immediately stripped of their authentic painterly language, reduced to an ideogram no different from the smiley face they support. Together, Reafsnyder’s formulaic devices lose their potency as archetype and expression, radically giving indeterminate status to contemporary painting and its aesthetic, edifying, and taste-making influences. For example, Summer Bliss has painterly moments reminiscent of works by Hans Hofmann, and Cecily Brown—that is, until the viewer identifies the red smiley face scrawled on top of a blue-green sweep of paint rendered with a quick pull of a palette knife through the lavishly fluid acrylic medium. The smile here, and elsewhere in his paintings, functions as an ironic wink, a friendly Bronx cheer that calls into question the authority of modern masters and their contemporary inheritors. The juxtaposition of abstraction and sign yields a playful critique of abstraction. Conversely, one has to ask the question: Do Reafsnyder’s paintings also reroute the unimaginative and hackneyed scribble of the smiley face from a cheap commercial meme into a profound universal utterance? Moreover, do the recurrent patterns issued from ancient human imaginations become more authentic and expressive through the act of defamiliarization? Reafsnyder’s smiley faces work as both modernist quotations and postmodern citations. The gestural abstract grounds can be said to function in that way, too—surrogates of

painterly flourishes comparable to David Reed’s brush strokes or Jeff Elrod’s line work. Yet the paintings as a whole convey a very real beauty. The material excess and saturated palate seduce the viewer on a visceral level that is at odds with reading these abstractions as a sign of critical work and strategy. In one way, Reafsnyder’s paintings parallel the pop seduction of Andy Warhol’s gutted color-repetitive practice: reflexive, analytical, and affecting. Award Winner brings scale into this equation. At 80 inches long, the vigorous red composition occupies peripheral vision. Tucked in this agitated abstract field, the viewer will discover child-like line contours of crude faces, as well as a figure that perhaps best resembles Patrick, the starfish character on SpongeBob SquarePants. Given the cultural conditions that are currently shaping contemporary painting and its discourses (Zombie Formalism and atemporality), the critical underpinnings and philosophical inquiries evoked in Reafsnyder’s paintings are not only indispensable to the language but also to understanding the world in which we are living. Subjectivity, intuition, mastery, and expression: These are all valued cultural conditions that Reafsnyder reminds us can be faked and yet profoundly felt. Free Float, Farrah, and Garden Fresh are thick full-body abstractions that feature no appropriated and contrasting sign system, but instead utilize the material glitches that emerge in the process of applying copious amounts of acrylic paint to a surface. Figure/ground dynamics are evoked as incidental marks, manifest as synonymous to Reafsnyder’s archetypal faces in these jeweled paintings. These paintings also remind us that the cult of authenticity is superseded by belief and trust, discovery and wonder. Furthermore, Reafsnyder’s practice insists that painting is an ample diagnostic that possesses the ability to examine the metaphysical questions bedeviling us today. n Michelle Grabner is an artist, a curator, and the chairwoman of the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also the co-founder and director of The Suburban and The Poor Farm exhibition spaces in Wisconsin. She served as one of the curators of the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

MICHAEL REAFSNYDER By David Pagel Painting and politics mix, all too often, like oil and water. Most painters who are serious about what they’re doing cannot be bothered with politics. They prefer to steer clear of political considerations, not because they believe that their art, in its transcendent sublimity, is above it all, but because politics, especially as formulated in the discussions that surround contemporary art, has come to denote little more than the intention of making some kind of meaningful commentary on the injustices of the cruel world in which we live. Whatever consequences those intentions might lead to are overlooked in favor of the fact that they address some pressing issues. Apparently, it’s more important to point out a problem than it is to do anything about the problem. For all sorts of reasons, meaning well has become an end in itself. A long time ago, people generally agreed that art was an end in itself. More recently, that perspective was dispensed with for being solipsistic, toothless, and formulaic. It got written off as “formalist.” So it is paradoxical, to say the least, that good intentions have become the grounds on which an artist’s work is now judged. Today, it seems that wanting to achieve something is tantamount to achieving it. The fantasy of accomplishment has come to stand in for the real thing. Part of the problem has to do with diminished attention spans and the forgetfulness induced by news cycles more focused on headlines than on stories that dig deeply. It’s part of a growing predilection for instantaneous gratification—or at least instantaneous information transmission, which is not the same as communication—and the impatience that goes along with it.

In such a situation, standing back, taking a deep breath, and giving a work of art the time and space to actually do something in the world turns out to be a pretty good move—if not a radical rejection of business as usual, which tends to turn the loose-endedness of ongoing experiences into tidy takeaways. Giving art the room it needs to do its own (often slow) thing simultaneously gives painting and politics the opportunity to get on with each other in ways more subtle (and productive) than they have been in quite some time.

That’s what happens when you look at one—or, even better, two or more—of Michael Reafsnyder’s new paintings. Each stops you in your tracks, its exceptionally dense constellation of colors and gestures, smears and squiggles, splotches and glyphs commanding all of your attentiveness—and then some. There’s simply too much going on—coloristically, compositionally, gesturally, and spatially (in other words, formally)—to apprehend, much less comprehend, in an instant. Yet the overload of visual stimulation that Reafsnyder’s paintings so effectively engineer is nothing like the image glut brought to us by digital technology. Where the superabundance of back-lit images that we see on our handheld devices, desktop computers, and flat-screen TVs washes over us in a virtual tidal wave of HD distraction, each of Reafsnyder’s richly textured abstractions sits still, like a bump on a log or a rock in a ditch. Despite the old-fashioned materials they are made of—paint squeezed from tubes, canvas cut from rolls, and sturdy stretcher bars supporting both—Reafsnyder’s paintings are not stick-in-the-mud throwbacks to an earlier era, when things were supposedly simpler. His homemade paintings are perfectly happy to go toe-to-toe with the most spectacular, eye-grabbing visuals on the planet, to compete, one-on-one, with everything out there. Rather than retreating into the safe space of academic art—or symbolic politics—his abstract paintings throw themselves into the tumult of everyday life. In that unpredictable to-and-fro, they not only hold their own against the special effects of big-budget Hollywood productions and the explosive pyrotechnics of Fourth of July

firework displays; they do things that movies and fireworks do not even dream of. They thrill viewers deeply by getting them to test their capacity to perceive patterns in chaos and, more importantly, to hold together, in the mind’s eye, disparate parts of divergent patterns, so viewers can see, in an instant, a single entity from several points of view. To look at a painting by Reafsnyder is to be immediately overwhelmed by an overload of visual stimulation. But if you let a little time pass—allowing your eyes to adjust to the jampacked extravaganza of marks and moves he has laid down, while giving your mind the opportunity to catch up with your eyes as they ricochet every which way—you begin to see the painting organize itself organically, some colors clustering together, some swoops of the palette knife recurring across the picture plane, and other elements settling in something like patterns—repeated arrangements of shapes, colors, and combinations of the two that are not identical to one another but close enough to be recognizable, kind of like cursive penmanship, but significantly more complex. The legibility of the various components that make up Reafsnyder’s compositions leads you to see larger patterns, which record, chronologically, the various moves he made with various knives to apply various mixtures of paint to his wildly variegated surfaces. That’s when things start to make sense. Eventually, you see the painting as anything but chaotic. There’s a method to the madness. Compositional principles emerge. Surface tension functions almost architecturally, holding together various territories. Color functions similarly, both receding into deep space and leaping into the foreground—and beyond. As with any endeavor that requires concentration, focus, and a bit of developed (i.e., sophisticated) attentiveness, the sharper your perceptions get, the more you see. As you become attuned to the nuances of Reafsnyder’s paintings—as your eyes are sensitized to the subtleties of his studio maneuvers—you begin to see and feel that each of his canvases seems to be at least two, often three, and sometimes four different paintings, all compressed onto a single surface.

Many of his small- and mid-size canvases home in on the sense that a couple of incompatible realities—or spaces—occupy a single picture plane. To make Bright Light, Summer Best, Free Float, Garden Fresh, Prize Time, Smooth Ground, and Farrah, Reafsnyder troweled a rainbow of thick, viscous paint onto each canvas and then dragged a large palette knife horizontally across its surface, smoothing the paint and blurring the colors to form a messy stripe painting with brick-shithouse solidity. There’s nothing flimsy about the walls of paint Reafsnyder has built in each of these compact abstractions. And that’s why what he does next is so effective.

Like a kid flinging a big spoonful of mashed potatoes and gravy across the room—just to see how it hits the wall, as well as to hear the sound it makes when it splotches there—Reafsnyder takes the paint-loaded palette knife he swiped horizontally across the painting, cocks his wrist back, and then whips the knife forward, flinging a big gob of paint toward the work’s wet surface. The impact of the paint sometimes craters the painting’s surface, like a meteorite hitting a planet. At other times, it lands gently and sits atop the previous layer, forming a 3D protrusion. In both cases, the tone and tint of Reafsnyder’s colors create great spatial complexity. If darker than their surroundings, they appear to be holes or rips or glitches in the painting’s surface. Through these interruptions, viewers get a glimpse of deep space, if not infinity. If lighter than their surroundings, they appear to hover above the picture plane, occupying the same space in which we stand. The collision between optical effects and material reality intensifies the sense that you are looking at three different things: 1) more than one way of making a painting, 2) more than one way of capturing reality abstractly, and 3) more than one world. That’s pretty heady. But it pales in comparison to what Reafsnyder does in his large paintings. Each large painting ups the ante of his smaller works, expanding their scope and intensifying their impact, sometimes mathematically but more often exponentially.

Where Reafsnyder’s small- and mid-size paintings zero in on the disjuncture between one space and another space (and the perceptual turbulence that the gap causes in viewers), his big ones are about piling such interruptions atop and alongside one another until the entire painting seems to be made up of nothing but interruptions and inconsistencies, all of which seem to be fissures in the space-time continuum or tears in the fabric of reality. Every part of every painting is not only on a collision course with all of the parts around it; each is also riven by internal tensions. The parts are less a unified entity that is complete unto itself than a force field of disruption that is on the verge of exploding or imploding—or both. In Reafsnyder’s hands, pattern provides neither stability nor calm—and not a whiff of stasis. Fluid and swirling, the repeated elements in his paintings give you a glimpse—for a split-second—of some kind of structure or order or optical architecture before disintegrating right before your eyes, dissolving into the swirling stew—or primordial soup—of his raucously energized surfaces. Unlike just about everything else out there (aside from books), Reafsnyder’s paintings sit still. But they don’t let your eyes sit still. And they don’t suffer fools. Many are built incrementally, kind of like brick walls but different. This is easiest to see in Paint Train, Fresh Mow, and Flow Master. The surfaces of these paintings are structured by single swipes of the palette knife, each applied next to another until the whole canvas is covered. Using a knife to scoop up paint from a flat palette is a lot different from dipping a brush into a puddle of paint, especially if you are Reafsnyder and want each swipe of your knife to leave a rainbow-bright band of multiple colors on the canvas—always beautifully, unpredictably blurred. Rocket-science is not required to figure out that Reafsnyder’s palette is the size of a tabletop. Or that it holds more paint—weighed in pounds—than you can lift comfortably. What Reafsnyder does with a palette knife reminds me of what Vincent van Gogh did with a paintbrush. To look at a painting by the Dutchman is to see that he often

reloaded his paintbrush after every stroke he applied to the canvas. No mixing, no filling in, no working the brush until it ran out of paint. Just the first juicy touch, the full brush leaving its load of wet paint on the raw canvas. When standing before one of his late paintings, it doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to see, in the mind’s eye, the back-and-forth of Van Gogh’s brush, hand, and arm, traveling from palette to canvas, over and over again, fast and frenetic, its urgency felt in your bones. The one-to-one symmetry—or palette-to-painting transmission—creates a rhythm that sustains, even soothes, the burning vibrancy of the paintings that result.

That’s how Reafsnyder’s paintings start out. But palette knives are more unwieldy than paintbrushes. Colors mix. Some run out. Others get added. Accidents happen. Paint misbehaves. Attention drifts. Opportunities are seized. Whims are followed. Illogic is indulged. The swipe-by-swipe rectangles that Reafsnyder begins building get interrupted—often dramatically. Playful improvisation does not swamp the structure so much as it throws a monkey wrench into it, transforming the lockstep regularity of the setup into something looser and more exuberant—but still rigorous. This can be seen in Paint Station, King Kruiser, and Wild World, whose increasing fluidity—and savvy improvisation— give Reafsnyder more room to maneuver. The underlying structure of his swipe-by-swipe process provides a bedrock for more extreme gaps to open up. Disorientation never looked better. Sweet Swing, Summer Bliss, and Award Winner leave the gridded girding of Reafsnyder’s carefully constructed compositions in the dust. To look at these paintings is to feel as if you’ve been tossed into the deep end—and had better swim swiftly if you’re not going to be swallowed up by the whirlpools of visual energy he has orchestrated. Despite the frenzy, patterns are present. It’s just hard to find them when you search for them. They’re easier to see out of the corners of your eyes. When you look right at them, they vanish.

The process can be frustrating, but it’s also liberating. Particularly when it makes room for intuition to come to the forefront and work its magic. Intentions get in the way of results. Difficult-to-spot patterns are also found in Cajun Spice, Garden Monster, and Underwater Squad, a trio of outliers in which Reafsnyder mixes his usual repertoire of vibrant primaries and secondaries into weirdly beautiful tertiaries, their grays, tans, and aquas never muddy or ugly but effervescent and refreshing. Both buoyant and out of this world, these paintings, like all of Reafsnyder’s new works, turn logic inside out to put us in touch with the freedom—and fun—of chaos. Wrapping your head around a painting by Reafsnyder is no mean feat. At the same time, it’s not all that complicated. If you can open several windows on a digital device, you’re one step away from understanding how his paintings work. Think of any one of his visually resplendent canvases as a whole lot of opened windows, not one of which blocks out the ones opened previously but, instead, lets you see everything on your screen all at once. To make sense of the stew, you have to let conventional ideas about intentions—good and otherwise—fall by the wayside. With them go standard notions of politics and painting, and the gulf that so often keeps them at arm’s length of each other. In place of all that, Reafsnyder’s paintings make room for the ongoing anarchy of experience—in all its befuddling, unscripted physicality and confounding, perception-sharpening beauty. Rather than making works with predetermined meanings, he makes paintings that misbehave like nobody’s business, generating experiences whose consequences depend on what each of us makes of them. Freedom is demanding. Otherwise, it’s not worth the canvas it’s painted on. n

David Pagel is an art critic who writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times. He is also a professor of art theory and criticism at Claremont Graduate University and an adjunct curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY.

Slip Stream, 2016 Acrylic on linen 15 x 18 inches 38.1 x 45.7 cm

Harvest Stream, 2016 Acrylic on linen 18 x 15 inches 45.7 x 38.1 cm

Cool Swell, 2016

Acrylic on linen 26 x 22 inches 66 x 55.9 cm

Float Jam, 2016 Acrylic on linen 52 x 60 inches 132.1 x 152.4 cm

Buoyant Buddies, 2016 Acrylic on linen 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Wild World, 2016

Acrylic on linen 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Star Shot, 2016 Acrylic on linen 26 x 22 inches 66 x 55.9 cm

Bright Light, 2017

Acrylic on linen 26 x 22 inches 66 x 55.9 cm

Farrah,

2017 Acrylic on linen 15 x 18 inches 38.1 x 45.7 cm

Free Float, 2017 Acrylic on linen 26 x 22 inches 66 x 55.9 cm

Garden Fresh, 2017 Acrylic on linen 26 x 22 inches 66 x 55.9 cm

Prize Time, 2017 Acrylic on linen 26 x 22 inches 66 x 55.9 cm

Smooth Ground, 2017

Acrylic on linen 26 x 22 inches 66 x 55.9 cm

Summer Best, 2017 Acrylic on linen 26 x 22 inches 66 x 55.9 cm

Summer Bliss, 2017

Acrylic on linen 48 x 60 inches 121.9 x 152.4 cm

Flow Master, 2017

Acrylic on linen 55 x 70 inches 139.7 x 177.8 cm

Underwater Squad, 2017

Acrylic on linen 55 x 70 inches 139.7 x 177.8 cm

Fresh Mow, 2017

Acrylic on linen 60 x 52 inches 152.4 x 132.1 cm

Garden Monster, 2017 Acrylic on linen 60 x 52 inches 152.4 x 132.1 cm

Paint Train, 2017

Acrylic on linen 60 x 52 inches 152.4 x 132.1 cm

Award Winner, 2017 Acrylic on linen 44 x 80 inches 111.8 x 203.2 cm

King Kruiser, 2017 Acrylic on linen 44 x 80 inches 111.8 x 203.2 cm

Sweet Swing, 2017

Acrylic on linen 44 x 80 inches 111.8 x 203.2 cm

Paint Station, 2017

Acrylic on linen 60 x 90 inches 152.4 x 228.6 cm

Cajun Spice, 2017 Acrylic on linen 60 x 90 inches 152.4 x 228.6 cm

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

MICHAEL REAFSNYDER 12 October – 11 November 2017

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe 525 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com Publication © 2017 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe All rights reserved Essay © 2017 Michelle Grabner Essay © 2017 David Pagel 64

Photography by Robert Wedemeyer, Los Angeles, CA Christopher Burke Studios, New York, NY Catalogue designed by HHA Design, New York, NY ISBN: 978-0-9979454-9-2 Front cover: Flow Master (detail), 2017 Back cover: Paint Station (detail), 2017

AMERINGER McENERY YOHE

IGOTTOKEEPMETHERE (AWAKEONATRAIN), 2014 Acrylic, oil, and collage on canvas 100 x 80 inches 254 x 203.2 cm