Michael Reafsnyder | Air Mail

"Things are happening in the paintings of Michael Reafsnyder, which seem to be inhabited by lives and objects moving so fast that they’ve become linear blurs and splashing wakes, giddily beyond grasp. Writing in 2019 about Reafsnyder, who was born in 1969 in Southern California, the late art critic Dave Hickey invoked Hans Hofmann, Cy Twombly, Willem de Kooning—color, mark making, joy. 'Reafsnyder has claimed gestural abstraction for California, where art was going when he started painting,' Hickey wrote in the last graph of his essay. 'The painting becomes a colorful, decorous superman, and the beholder becomes one of the superman’s pals.' Get to Miles McEnery, where Reafsnyder leaps tall buildings in a single bound." —L.J.