"The Anatomy of a Stroke: Recent Paintings by Joan Snyder" by Marcia Tucker

Modern painting, like modern thought generally, obliges us to admit a truth which does not resemble things, which is without any external model and without any predestined instruments of expression, and which is nevertheless truth.

—Merleau-Ponty, Signs

SEEING JOAN SNYDER’S PAINTINGS for the first time is like looking into a partially demolished building filled with the remnants and debris of its occupants’ lives; the initial experience is that of surprise, disorientation, curiosity. It is the paradox of an intimacy aggressively exposed. There is almost too much to look at at once”, a shocking sense of disorder in the context of what were once structured, habitable spaces.

Many reductive or “Minimal” paintings seem to have closed up their surfaces over the sensate world of susceptibility, gesture, violence or spontaneity that characterized Abstract Expressionism. They present to the eye an objecthood, an “isness,” a non-symbolic totality in which the work does not signify anything outside itself. As the predominant pictorial mode, they have altered our vision and our expectations.

In sculpture, on the other hand, a move away from the making of objects has become increasingly apparent. It is as though the object is being dissected, and process, material, site, concept and temporality as the component parts of traditional sculpture have now become the subject or the object of the sculpture itself. This has not been true for painting, which by its nature is contained within the shape of the canvas, and can go no further out. It can, however, go further in, since the potential for optical space in a painting is virtually limitless. The illusion of depth has consequently been of concern to painters from the early Renaissance on.

Read full article at artforum.com.