MICHAEL REAFSNYDER

"Reafsnyder’s titles evoke places and things. The canvases sure look like abstraction at first glance, but names like Blue Lagoon (2023), Sunday Picnic (2023), and Pacific Plunge (2023), make you want to look for some hint of landscape or architecture on which to get a foothold. Much like Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings, where I can be absolutely certain I can make out a hilly grid of streets in San Francisco only to have the grid flash off into a patchwork of colors and shapes just as my mind was starting to get hold of it, Reafsnyder’s paintings are mesmerizing, and withhold their referent tantalizingly. They work on the eye’s desire to find something to land on and recognize."

- Julian Hoeber in "About Reafsnyder"

"By letting paint be paint, Reafsnyder manages to let the chain of signification add link after link. The mud connects to the cave, the birthplace of culture, to a chunk of rock, to a wave on a shore, to water crashing and slapping against the rock, making gelatinous pale green flecks and blobs of foam, to dense sand slowly absorbing water going from glossy to flat and planar, a concrete slab, the side of a house, a clean white wall, a painting hanging on that wall."

- Julian Hoeber in "About Reafsnyder"