V-2 Snyder:Joan Snyder's River Becomes A Room.

"Painting is the way I speak. I had such an anxiety-ridden youth that when I started to paint, it was as though I was speaking for the first time. I was creating a visual language through which I could say anything I wanted" - Joan Snyder

The River Becomes A Room (2018)

If it's true that painting is the way Joan Snyder speaks then it has to be said her words don't often make a lot of sense. That doesn't mean they're not interesting. It doesn't mean they don't sound pleasant. It doesn't mean I don't want to hear them. It just means I am not blessed with the skills of being able to interpret these daubs into any form of recognisable narrative. My bad!

Or is it? I'd popped into Blain/Southern on Hanover Square to have a look at her Rosebuds & Rivers exhibition on Saturday afternoon and I have to admit I didn't spend as long looking at the entire show as one couple spent pondering one solitary painting. They seem transfixed by every minute detail of last year's The River Becomes A Room, at one point even poking the side of the canvas. Something I'd assumed would have been frowned upon by the gallery.

Perhaps I was right. Perhaps they were. Perhaps these works need time, not a mobile phone camera lens and a man in a rush to move on to the next thing. I'd seen Snyder's work before at Blain/Southern as part of their 2017 Playground Structure show (which also featured both Mary Heilman and Jeff Wall) and I wasn't totally sure what to make of it then. I'm still not.   

Milk & Rosebuds (2018)

Celadon & Silk (2018)

After that show I'd written, somewhat pretentiously, about her dissolving the grid and embracing its possible fluidity (before seemingly complaining that her paintings didn't include the promised/threatened tits and fannies) and, to continue in that hi-falutin' style, I'd say that Blain/Southern's Rosebuds & Rivers show starts from the point where she's left 'the grid' way behind.

These paintings don't seem formally beholden to any pattern. Colour is everywhere, abstraction dominates. But, still, tiny figurative, er, figures crop up in paintings like Celadon & Silk and dominate the canvas in works like 2017's Yellow Figure. Snyder, now 79, broke through in the late sixties with her 'stroke' paintings in which she claimed her idea was "to study the anatomy of a stroke, isolating them and using them much like creating a symphony or a piece of music".

Yellow Figure (2017)

Amor Matris (2015)

Almost a reaction to the minimalist aesthetic, Snyder started filling her paintings, overpopulating them with stuff. She claimed to "speak with symbols and marks and colours and materials", she built up her art with organic matter as well as paint, and she asserted there was some kind of story to be told in her art. 

Which is where she loses me. It's one thing to claim that this "language" can't be "easily described" and that it's "coming from the collective unconscious" but it's quite another to expect anyone else to reply with anything other than "okay, nice painting". I know I'm ranting about press releases again but they've got so lame of late (probably always have been) that not only do they not enhance the art, they actually put me off it. 

Fragments of a Soul (2018)

Small Rose Altar (2014)

Snyder says "there's a kind of magic that happens" when she paints but she doesn't seem to care if the Earth doesn't move for us too. I mean, it was nice and all that but, let's be honest, it's more a wank than a long satisfying shag in front of a roaring fire with glasses of Rioja on hand for post-coital refreshment. 

It's a pity that such grand claims are made for this art because, truth be told, it's quite pleasant. Milk & Rosebuds uses a lovely shade of red, the yellow of Summer Fugue is imbued with a sad light that coaxes you in, and Floating Soul makes use of such rich purples and browns you can't help be drawn to it.

Summer Fugue (2010)

Floating Soul (2018)

Song Cycle 6 for Molly (2016)

Song Cycle 6 for Molly (I've got no problems with pretentious names for the artworks, that seems like part of the fun) is also the kind of painting you'd not get bored of if you had the funds to have it on your wall. But that's to talk of art as mere decoration and Snyder seems to be aiming higher. Like many artists.

Like most of those artists she also fails. There's nothing wrong in pure decoration and on that very basic, and honest, level these paintings are somewhat delightful. Any grander claim, I'm afraid, ain't cutting it with me.

Proserpina (2013)

Take 5 (2017)

Winter Rose (2013)