"Joan Snyder: The Summer Becomes a Room" by William Corwin

There is a hieroglyph in the Egyptian alphabet that is a representation of a pool with lotuses: the pictograph is a horizontal rectangle with a few stylized flowers and buds emerging from its top surface. There is something comforting about this cool little pool, the idea that it was part of a visual language, appearing in a text here and there, offering a phonetic component (“sha”) to words, but also reminding the reader of a place where they might seek refuge. Joan Snyder’s current exhibition The Summer Becomes a Room is about this idea as well, both the image of fecund and vibrant life and the use of that notion as a kernel or symbol to accent large expanses of the artist’s own image-glyphs that populate her diptychs and triptychs. The horizontal rectangular form also is a recurring theme in Snyder’s work, in Paint a Pond, Inner Green, Black Lake, and In Woodstock (all 2019). As is clear from the titles, the rectangle/pool/field form straddles a wide spectrum of significations for the artist: of life, multiplicity, encompassing, as well as a stand-in for the art object itself, but certainly shares many of the implications of its Egyptian antecedent.

Snyder wraps this body of work in an overwhelming sense of acceptance and gratitude for the cycles of nature: the seasons, life and death, day and night, morning and dusk. Overall this seems a positive reckoning; her palette is bright and harmonious, and it’s hard not to get a boost from looking at it. Many of the paintings are broken into diptychs or triptychs, though, following a very traditional format for displaying the two sides of the coin, Snyder’s paintings often imply a pair of oppositional readings, a down for every up. In Field Marks (2019), a thickly painted field of drippy oval forms, predominantly orange, light gray, and pink/fuchsia is played against a patchwork of Hofmann-esque rectangles and squares, a mass of blossoms against an imperious pink and purple textured square. Is there balance between the uproar of life and the control of measured geometry?

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