Dennis Hollingsworth

Michael Reafsnyder at Western Projects

At Michael Reafsnyder's opening at Western Projects in Culver City, I asked owner/director Cliff Benjamin to talk about Michael's work on camera and he was all no way Jose, thus destroying my effort to mug an unselfconsciousness presentation of an artist's work by his dealer.

I don't blame him, I react the same way to impromptu stage fright. The camera is such a conversation killer.

But here is the first part of Benjamin's introduction to Michael's new catalog, published with the exhibition:

Michael Reafsnyder is perhaps one of the most peculiar artists I have worked with. His work is unvieled, immediate, preposterous, inventive and magnificent. While many painters are technically proficient, Reafsnyder possesses the additional quality of being a great artist (not all painters are good artists, but that is another discussion). What continually stuns me is his audacity - how did you think of this - how dare you be so happy, i.e. at peace? Who do you think you are? While some might find this trivial - to me, it is deeply philosophical...

Well, that's alright, but I like the Saatchi description better:

Opening tonight is an exhibition by Southern Californian artist Michael Reafsnyder, his first solo show for four years. Comprised of large-scale paintings, drawings and sculpture, 'Aqua La La' is a series of exuberant, energetic works which revel in the use of colour and the texture of paint.

Each painting is completed in one session, and what at first might seem a spontaneous, visual equivalent of stream of consciousness writing, is in fact the result of deep thought about the composition of each inch of canvas and the overall structure of each individual painting. One picture might literally bear the weight of hundreds of pounds of oil paint, as it is smeared onto the canvas, creating a sense of chaos - sometimes delicious, sometimes foreboding - which at the same time has its own inner logic.

There is an unapologetic sense of pleasure in the visual in Reafsnyder's work, which is noted on the gallery's press release as 'an antidote in our age of digital graphic glibness'. But this doesn't mean that Reafsnyder's world is an entirely rosy one - the paintings have a dark undercurrent of menace and creepiness in them, which lurks beneath the 'tornadoes of poison and sugar'.

Against the "my kid could do that" dismissal, my responses could be:
1) ...well let's see him do it.
2) Maybe, but not for too many times...
3) Yea, but you couldn't...
4) ...isn't that great?
5) No they couldn't.

The thing about Michael's painting is that it's damn hard to do- that state of flow and resist that you have to maintain to suspend paint in this state of controlled kinetics. "Mud" is the term painters use for incohate color mixing, spectrum chaos, a limit delineating failure. One more touch, another pass and you find that the color of visual noise is brown. Mud is easy to stumble into if you don'tresist it, and Michael doesn't stumble.

The first contemporary comparison that comes to my mind would be the work of Andr? Butzer in Berlin (Cliff B. lists his historical lineage : "...in the footsteps of Asger Jorn, Guston and Dubuffett..."). Michael makes and maintains his connections to painters young an old, figuratively and literally. The upshot is that this kind of painting is not a one shot deal historically. Voices in this vein are layered by generations now, the dialog deeper than what most people would generally assume.

I like to think of painting as the dynamics of opposites in tension. Solvents and binders. Lines and pools. Drawing is a pull that makes distinctions, this is that and that is the other. Pooling (otherwise known as painting) is the ooze of liquid paint, a violation of the territories made by drawing. In Michael's work, drawing and pooling are decoupled and the result is a delightful run amok.

What is supercool is that Michael seesaws from sculpture and back to painting, working the formal dynamics of mass against color and line. In the video, you might see the glazed terra cotta figures as I do: where a kind of lynchpin was pulled out of figural modeling as the masses slump into a coil of line and bellies of color. And it seems to me that the happiness he celebrates is that feeling of paint squeezed out of the tube, fat and wet, floppy and squirty. It's almost as he were painting portraits of liquid paint itself.

Posted by Dennis at February 21, 2007 2:32 PM