"Joan Snyder’s Painterly Abstractions Are Neither Coy Nor Evasive" by Barry Schwabsky

On my way to take a last long look at “ComeClose,” Joan Snyder’s exhibition this past winter at Canada gallery in New York, I happened to stop in at a nearby gallery where I saw a show by a young painter whose work beguiled but left me frustrated with its too-coy interplay between abstract and figurative elements. At Snyder’s show, the feeling led me to reflect on something that had not previously occurred to me in the nearly 40 years I’ve spent looking at her work and occasionally discussing it with her, but which suddenly emerged as crucial: In Snyder’s work, nothing is ever coy or evasive. A brush mark laid down atop another always asserts itself as just that, a brush mark: color of a certain quantity and quality marking the path along which it has been pushed or pulled. Likewise, an impastoed mass of paint representing a rose—however physically palpable it may be, however insistent that it is a quantity of paint—always unequivocally represents a rose. In Snyder’s painting Grounding (2022–23), that takes the form of some white matter with a drizzling of translucent red over it.

That decisiveness is one of the main sources of the intense pleasure I take in Snyder’s art. Seeing how everything in her work is what it is makes me feel—I don’t know how else to say it—encouraged in my own being. And if what a thing is in one of Snyder’s paintings is in fact two things (or even many things) at once—a splotch of paint but also a rose, for instance—it is all those things with equal insistence and without prevarication: never just a bit of this mixed with a bit of that, never hedged.

Read full article at artinamerica.com.