Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Michael Reafsnyder, on view at 525 West 22nd Street from 28 March through 11 May 2024. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 28 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. This is Reafsnyder’s eighth exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a digital catalogue with an essay by Julian Hoeber. 

Reafsnyder’s exuberant and celebratory paintings relish in delight, glee, and exhilaration. They refuse the notion that gestural painting emerges from the anguish of life; they reject both easy existentialism and sentimental pathos. The sheer pleasure of viewing Reafsnyder’s nuanced surfaces is stimulated by their abundance of vividly saturated colors, their profusion of painterly gestures, and their array of enigmatic compositions. Rather than romanticizing a past set of values, or anticipating future ones, the paintings render palpable a present moment in our experience of visual imagery. In his art, the actual contingencies of viewing and the pictorial conditions for communication meet in a cacophony of all-or-nothing enthusiasm. 

Julian Hoeber writes, “Paint is a material. It is organized in a painting by play and discovery. That organizing will inevitably produce arrangements of paint that generate meaning, be they ghostly faces or histories or sense tingling fields of color. The sensations have affect and are not neutral. The histories aren’t either, but Reafsnyder won’t let them be albatrosses. He comes to them with other things— his proclivities and tastes, his peculiar banks of knowledge, the limits of his particular physical self— that let those histories go off on tangents, turn into jokes or open up on more possibilities for play.”