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16/4/2008

Gerry Snyder

Claire Oliver Gallery, New York

In “Fundamental”, Gerry Snyder presents six new large scale paintings, the subjects of which are the leading culprits of the current worrisome political climate: fundamentalist religion, white supremacist nationalism, and hetero-normative patriarchy. The figures that populate Snyder's narratives are hermaphroditic creatures that recall the Judaeo- Christian concept that woman was created from man, the natural extrapolation of which is that God's most perfect creation, the original human, was transgendered. Snyder's little beings have no mouths thus, they have no ability to speak, they often lack arms and legs thus cannot act for themselves. Benign and even tender, idiosyncratic spirits, they seem to be completely ridiculous yet trying to maintain a certain dignity.

On closer inspection however, what we see does give some cause for alarm: these delightful concatenations of animal and plant look like nothing so much as genetic experiments gone awry, their interspecies character suggesting their existence is an accident of creation, not a transgressive choice. Snyder's creatures inhabit landscapes that are beautifully painted in a style reminiscent of 18th-century French landscape painting. With a nod to Francois Boucher, Jean-Honore Fragonard and Antoine Watteau, Snyder knows that his landscapes are visually seductive; he consciously paints his backgrounds in a way that holds the viewer’s interest long enough to engage him in the narrative. It is a quirky combination, these delightfully cartoony and hapless figures playing out their fate in such bucolic surroundings.

Gerry Snyder's art is that of a paradoxical outsider. Obviously he's not an outsider in the sense of being untrained or mentally unwell, but rather that he has chosen to live outside of the main stream and, in part because of this, has not developed a reputation thus far that places him in the midst of contemporary art discourse. However, Snyder aims at the heart of both art history and the contemporary art scene: as the Chinese literati retired to the countryside to wait out the despotic regime, Snyder patiently hones his talents while delivering messages of urgency and alarm to those who are alert enough to receive them. Snyder perceives the patterns of social and cultural forces that threaten to overwhelm our hard-won civilization; his art tells us bitter truths through a brightly hued comic guise. While Snyder’s work has a connection to the chromatically rich figurative paintings of Lisa Yuskavage or to Cindy Sherman's film-based representations, Snyder's art exudes a feeling of utter idiosyncrasy.

Gerry Snyder, it seems, is not an outsider at all, but rather an artist who has the capacity to see into the heart of our collective psyche. His works deserve to be widely seen, for their surreal beauty as well as their frightening realism. Gerry Snyder is 54 years old and lives and works in New Mexico. His paintings have been exhibited nationally and were included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Snyder earned his B.F.A. in painting from the University of Oregon in 1986 and his M.A. in art and media from New York University in 1988. Snyder's work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Fundamental” is Snyder’s first solo exhibition in New York.

Preview with the artist Thursday, April 17, from 6 to 8 pm

Claire Oliver
513 West 26th Street - New York
Free admission

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