Michael Reafsnyder 2022 by Miles McEnery Gallery

MICHAEL REAFSNYDER

511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

LOSING VOICE/TAKING FORM By Charles Palermo “ But if you take away my voice,” said the little mermaid, “what have I then left?” “Your beautiful form,” said the witch. These paintings are relatively large. They are painted in bright acrylic colors (apart from a small group of grisailles with “Paint” in the title, which still have bright color, although value gets the upper hand over chroma). The paint gets thick—indeed, some passages could be called undercut relief, which seems apposite because their physicality tempts one to get close, to see these works from within. Paint is dragged across the surface with Plexiglas sheets of various degrees of transparency and flexibility for different tasks. The dragged passages of variegated color are perhaps the most obtrusive, however a variety of visual incident, and techniques, is fully evident. Reafsnyder makes some especially important pictorial elements by launching blobs of paint at the wet surface. These produce depressions at their nuclei and can spread out over the painting as if they were traversing it. (And they often look a little like tadpoles.) Cuts in the paint read as marks and reveal substrata. Gaps in dragged swaths make other, negative, shapes. Now and then, a possible brushstroke appears. The big gestures suggest motion—a kind of physical freedom or abundance of energy that one might associate with the post-painterly abstraction of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. The analogy to the work of such painters is not unwarranted. Reafsnyder refers to his shift—in the 2000s—to acrylic paint using the language of risk. He has used the term one-shot painting, as Noland did, to name the risk. The suppression of the trace of brush or wrist—the quality of paint-handling that gives post-painterly abstraction its name—is here very forcefully felt.1 As is color. There the analogy between Reafsnyder’s work and the post-painterly abstractionists finds its limit. His work has the intense color associated with Louis’s and Noland’s, but not the nearvirtual quality given to it by staining the paint into the canvas.

What is real in the relation is the one-shot. These paintings have all been made in a single day. That has been true at least since Reafsnyder’s turn to acrylic paint. The unforgiving combination of acrylic paint and application method makes effects characteristic of this kind of abstraction—an effect of color spreading itself, as if by some unfamiliar force—the payoff for ceding certain forms of close control, such as one has with a brush. Plenty of marks evoke gesture, but, given the not immediately obvious way the gestures translate into paint, one seeks metaphors for the color’s movements and other workings. Somewhere between Reafsnyder’s expert handling of the acrylic paint and the fictional space of the resulting waves and cuts and slashes and stuttered vectors of color, manipulation gives way to fiction. Between the two is the risk that Reafsnyder runs.

Risk does not mean “mere chance.” Reafsnyder has long used a metal stretcher with adjustable tension screws to produce specific results from his technique—making a gap of a certain size and shape possible within a dragged stripe of paints by selecting a transparent plexi and slackening the canvas to allow the support to back away from the plexi as he monitors the results through the transparent tool. (A stunning example inhabits the lower left zone of Flutterby.) The paint obeys his will while seeming to have swept itself into place. He claims his blobs of paint that produce the colorful, round impressions with their tadpole tails land just where and how he wants them. It is not a game of chance, but one of skill. It is not randomness; rather it is risk. An important difference between this latest campaign of work and series of past years is the near-complete absence of smiling faces. As is widely remarked by critics, smiling faces cavorted across the paintings’ surfaces, suggest a joyful, playful, not-too-serious spirit. Reafsnyder allows this reading and calls these presences inhabitants. It would be perverse to deny the playfulness of the smiling faces. But they are something else, too. The art historian Michael Schreyach has explained that they regulate the beholder’s tendency to read affect out of these works or to read figuration in. They embody the fact that paintings face us. Thus they spur us to interpret and to renounce the easy pleasure of decoration. They join the physical surface of the paint with the fiction of flowing color space. And they release the painter from the present of the painting, permitting him to declare his separateness from it.

Titian, The Education of Amor, Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy, ca. 1488/90-1576

They also manifest the artist’s understanding of the painting’s space—how it works. Reafsnyder drew a study after Titian, in which smiling inhabitants take over for two of Titian’s figures. They are the two right-hand figures, repeated in a margin added to the drawing. Figures turn this way and that across the drawn composition. Reafsnyder explains, the faces do not simply reproduce the painting’s drama or diagram its surface. Or merely measure out the work’s internal geometry. They chart forces, “patterns of interaction”, that structure Titian’s painting— how it works, not the pattern within it or the story it represents. (See Schreyach, pp. 15–16). The two figures Reafsnyder adds participate as well as witness. They are inside and outside. They represent Reafsnyder’s place—the painter is not just outside the work, an unseen actor whose presence is simply external to the finished product. Like risk, the painter occupies a liminal place, between the process and the effect, between the material reality of making and the fiction. Partly inside and partly outside. *** “So I must die and float as foam upon the sea! I shall not hear the music of the billows, or see the beautiful flowers and the red sun! Can I, then, do nothing at all to win an immortal soul?”2 The smiling inhabitants have mostly vanished from view in the later work; nevertheless, at least one painting, Swirl, shows drawn personages. Here, as in some recent works on paper, it is a mermaid who is featured.

Reafsnyder says mermaids and their companions are on the canvases, but underneath the paintings, rather than on top, as the smiling faces were. The relations of direction and intention and movement among the inhabitants structure the layers Reafsnyder makes on top. The big movements of paint translate those relations into zones. The blobs and other forms (like the negative space amid a big swath of colors) become the new inhabitants. They have direction and intention, too, like the mermaids did. But they are no longer the personages we knew. The relations and movements belong not to playful inhabitants but to the fictional forces—the fiction of color moving itself—of Reafsnyder’s post-painterly gestural abstraction.

What does that displacement mean? The painting begins in one world (the world of the mermaids and their familiars), moves through another (a space where Reafsnyder’s careful manipulations of paint translate them into compositions that could only be his own), and ends in yet another (the world of color that moves as if according to a world of forces we must imagine). The first world determines the forces that govern the last, but between them everything changes. Between those worlds is risk. Reafsnyder has explained that he lays the paintings flat on metal sawhorses and hems himself in close to them with moveable barriers, which prevent him from stepping back from the canvas he works. To see these works from such a perspective is to see them differently. This is not how the paintings should be seen. It is to occupy a space like that inhabited by the figures Reafsnyder added on the right margin of his drawing after Titian. It is to see the vectors that cross the painting not from outside, according to their extension across the field, but from inside. One’s vision enters a line of force or direction, plunges along it, the way a mermaid’s might. Step to the left or right, and the vector’s plunge disappears and becomes its profile. The point of the demonstration is to show me that Reafsnyder occupies a mermaid’s view when he works—standing in the painting’s plane but to one side, like the figures he added to his translation of Titian’s composition. It is a liminal space, like that of risk, between the material realities of making and the post-painterly, abstract fiction that may successfully emerge if the one shot hits home. Like Hans Christian Andersen’s mortal mermaid in the sea who imagines life above, where humans with immortal souls eventually rise above like stars and look down over everything from a position beyond contingency and risk.

I am very aware of something dangerous—even reckless—in giving so much weight and credence to what is said, rather than what is to be seen in the work. But the boundaries have moved. The smiling faces that used to articulate the relations on the surface of the painting, and that which used to regulate certain reckless impulses in the beholder, have been sublimated within the silent depths. The dialogue between the graffiti and the abstract swaths of paint is different—transformed by the mutation of the inhabitants into faceless forms, which modulate the thick surface of the paint in the literal, sculptural way of relief. The reciprocal exchange between the inhabitants and their material environment persists, but the faces no longer forestall the temptation to read affect out, or, to read figuration into the paintings. Do these new, faceless inhabitants still challenge the beholder to understand the abstraction of Reafsnyder’s paintings? (Schreyach, p. 4). The complex and densely interwoven determinations among the layers of the paintings still do that, without smiling faces. Do they still announce the end of the painter’s immersion in the world of the painting? (Schreyach, pp. 20-21). No. These challenges and tasks remain for us, but we face them without guidance. If there is anything to be gained by taking a chance on the painter’s fairy tale of saw horses and mermaids, it is above all to remind the reader that there is a liminal space between the material making and the impersonal fiction, between act and form, where the painter’s voice is lost and the painting addresses itself to beholders who, like immortal souls, look down on it where its risks have been run right in view.

Endnotes 1. Michael Schreyach puts the effect of the painter’s curious way of moving paint justly, explaining “the effect of a continuous modulation of hue and value. . . prevents us from describing those lines as independent ‘strokes.’ That is, the longitudinal streaks seem to result not from a sequence of individually applied marks but rather from a single— almost impossibly broad—gesture” (Michael Schreyach, “What Painting Can Do” in Michael Reafsnyder: New Paintings (New York: Miles McEnery Gallery, 2019), p. 9.) The point, as I see it, is that Reafsnyder’s way of moving masses of paint evokes gesture, but does so in an unfamiliar way, in a way that refuses reading in terms of

brushstrokes and, as the words “almost impossibly broad” suggest, in a way that strains understanding as an ordinary human action. One begins to sense other, more complex relations and determinations at work. Ultimately, one may seek license to use natural metaphors to understand the movement of the paint (pp. 18–19). 2. Hans Christian Andersen, “The Little Mermaid” in Fairy Tales and Stories, trans. Hans Lien Braekstad, illus. Hans Tegner (New York: The Century Company, 1900).

Charles Palermo is a Professor of Art History at The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA

Beagle Bounce, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 40 x 46 inches 101.6 x 116.8 cm

Blue Brew, 2021 Acrylic on linen 52 x 60 inches 132.1 x 152.4 cm

Candidate, 2021 Acrylic on linen 60 x 52 inches 152.4 x 132.1 cm

Cardiff Rain, 2021 Acrylic on linen 44 x 60 inches 111.8 x 152.4 cm

Deep End, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 52 x 44 inches 132.1 x 111.8 cm

Firecracker, 2021 Acrylic on linen 52 x 60 inches 132.1 x 152.4 cm

Flutterby, 2021 Acrylic on linen 52 x 60 inches 132.1 x 152.4 cm

Funnel Cake, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 40 x 46 inches 101.6 x 116.8 cm

Paint Loader, 2021 Acrylic on linen 84 x 72 inches 213.4 x 182.9 cm

Paint Master, 2021 Acrylic on linen 84 x 72 inches 213.4 x 182.9 cm

Paint Party, 2021 Acrylic on linen 84 x 72 inches 213.4 x 182.9 cm

Paint Wave, 2021 Acrylic on linen 84 x 72 inches 213.4 x 182.9 cm

Rocket Pop, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 52 inches 152.4 x 132.1 cm

Swirl, 2021

Acrylic on linen 60 x 44 inches 152.4 x 111.8 cm

MICHAEL REAFSNYDER Born in Orange, CA in 1969 Lives and works in Orange, CA

2011 “Feast,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY “Delight,” Marty Walker Gallery, Dallas, TX

EDUCATION

2010 “Put It There,” Western Project, Culver City, CA “Sweetness,” Rebecca Ibel Gallery, Columbus, OH

1996 MFA, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA

2009 “Undone,” R. B. Stevenson Gallery, La Jolla, CA

1992 BA, Chapman University, Orange, CA

2007 “Fresh,” W.C.C.A., Singapore, Singapore “Aqua La La,” Western Project, Culver City, CA “Whirl,” R. B. Stevenson Gallery, La Jolla, CA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2022 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2005 “Paintings and Sculpture from 2002-2005,” Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas, NV

2020 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2004 “Yum-Yum,” Uplands Gallery, Melbourne, Australia

2017 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY

2003 “Paintings,” Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2016 “In Bloom,” R. B. Stevenson Gallery, La Jolla, CA

2002 “Paintings,” Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain “Paintings,” Finesilver, San Antonio, TX

2015 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY 2014 “Sunday Best,” Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA 2013 “We Ate The House,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY 2012 “Gleam,” R. B. Stevenson Gallery, La Jolla, CA

2001 “Paintings,” Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Present/Future,” Artissima, Turin, Italy 1999 “Paintings,” Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 1997 “Paintings,” Blum & Poe, Santa Monica, CA

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2021 “Flying Colors,” Contemporary Art Matters, Columbus, OH “Return of the Dragons,” Blossom Market, Los Angeles, CA 2020 “Do You Think It Needs A Cloud?,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “Little Gems,” Telluride Fine Art, Telluride, CO 2019 “Combo Platter: Collaborative Woks by Michael Reafsnyder and David Kiddie,” Harris Art Gallery, University of La Verne, La Verne, CA

2018 “Abstract Thinking,” R. B. Stevenson Gallery, La Jolla, CA “Michael Reafsnyder & Patrick Wilson,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2017 “Non-Objective Painting,” Telluride Fine Art, Telluride, CO “Painters Room,” R. B. Stevenson Gallery, La Jolla, CA 2015 “Works in Paper II,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA “Recent Acquisitions,” Barrick Museum, Las Vegas, NV “Paths and Edges,” Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, Orange, CA 2014 “Floor Flowers,” Peggy Phelps Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA 2012 “Into the Light,” Barrick Museum, Las Vegas, NV 2011 “Los Angeles Ceramic Museum of Art,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA “Summer Selections,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY

2010 “Forever Now,” Peggy Phelps Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA “Keramik,” Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, CA “Summer Selections,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY “Just Enough,” R. B. Stevenson Gallery, La Jolla, CA 2009 “Electric Mud,” Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, Houston, TX “Selected Works from Pilliod Records,” Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY “Way Out West,” Donna Beam Art Gallery, Las Vegas, NV “Good Ship Lollipop,” CTRL, Houston, TX “Well-Tempered,” R. B. Stevenson Gallery, La Jolla, CA “Sculpture Two,” Western Project, Culver City, CA “Collecting California: Selections from Laguna Art Museum,” Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA 2008 “Like Lifelike” (curated by Brad Spence), Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, CA “iCandy: Current Abstraction in Southern California,” Cypress College Art Gallery, Cypress, CA “Splash,” Rebecca Ibel Gallery, Columbus, OH “Luscious Abstraction,” Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion, Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa, CA “Black Dragon Society,” Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles, CA 2007 “Summer Selections,” Rebecca Ibel Gallery, Columbus, OH “Abstract,” R. B. Stevenson Gallery, La Jolla, CA 2006 “Too Many Tear Drops,” David Reed Studio, New York, NY “A Little So Cal Abstraction,” Mandarin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Discovery,” West Coast Contemporary Art, Singapore, Singapore 2005 “Step into Liquid” (curated by Dave Hickey), Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, CA “In Bloom,” Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles, CA

2004 “Fresh Paint,” Gallery Eugene Lendl, Graz, Austria “Painting and Sculpture,” Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Funny Business: Humor in Art from the Permanent Collection,” Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA “The O Scene,” Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA “Now and Then Some,” Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA 2003 “LA TAP,” Uplands Gallery, Melbourne, Australia “Not the Usual Suspects” (curated by James Hayward), Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Pfat and Sassy,” Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM “Extreme Paint,” Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA

1999 “Under 500: Intimate Abstract Paintings,” Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles, CA “LA/ New York Abstract,” Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art, New York, NY 1996 “Risk,” The Loft, Laguna Beach, CA 1995 “Ride ‘Um Hunter” (curated by Daniel Mendel-Black), Gander Mountain High, Pasadena, CA

SELECT COLLECTIONS Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH

2002 “Five Times Four,” Modernism, San Francisco, CA “Trade Show,” Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, Orange, CA “New in Town” (curated by Bruce Guenther), Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR “Western States,” Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

Creative Artist’s Agency, Los Angeles, CA Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas, NV

2001 “Cal’s Art: Sampling California Painting,” University of North Texas, Denton, TX “One Minute of Your Time: A Brief Survey of Southern California Art from 1835 to 2001” (curated by Tyler Stallings), Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA “The Stuff Dreams are Made From,” Art Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany 2000 “New Work: Abstract Painting,” Todd Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA “New American Painting 15” (curated by David Pagel), The Jones Center for Contemporary Art, Austin, TX “Paint, American Style,” Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Radar Love” (with Gajin Fujita, Andrea Bowers and Linda Stark), Gallery Marabini, Bologna, Italy

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA North Dakota Museum of Art, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR Progressive Corporation, Mayfield Village, OH Weisman Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

MICHAEL REAFSNYDER 28 April – 4 June 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery 511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2021 Charles Palermo Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Photography by Robert Wedemeyer, Los Angeles, CA Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue designed by McCall Associates, New York, NY Special thanks to Ulysses Jackson at Golden Artist Colors. ISBN: 978-1-949327-71-7 Cover: Blue Brew, (detail), 2021