"Marty Schnapf's paintings-textural, kaleidoscopic, and tenderly surreal-dwell in the watery space between two shores, as if plumbing the depths of the psyche. Vacillating between modes of figuration and abstraction, the crisply rendered compositions in Vignettes depict figures and scenes culled from personal dreams and recollections, positioning the paintings as portals to extrasensory realities where colors, sensations, and symbolic archetypes bleed and intertwine."
"Water, a primordial element and a symbol of the abyssal fluidities of the subconscious, features prominently in these paintings. In the large-scale work Memory Pool, inspired by a dream, a translucent figure stands waist-deep in the ocean, seemingly communing with a school of luminescent fish orbiting his body beneath the surface.In The Pull of the Moon, the Draw of the Shore, another towering painting, three figures in a canoe, their bodies mostly obscured by sprays of foam, navigate a tempestuous sea at sunset."
Schnapf's paintings combine tactile surfaces and kaleidoscopic imagery to occupy an in-between watery realm that evokes subconscious depths. The works shift between figuration and abstraction, rendering figures drawn from dreams and memories as gateways to extrasensory realities where color, sensation, and archetypal symbols overlap. Painted bodies function as somatic vessels for uncanny abstraction, contorting, folding, refracting, and dissolving into surrounding elements. Water recurs as a primordial motif, blurring thresholds between body and sea in works like Memory Pool, The Pull of the Moon, The Grateful Swimmer, and River Crossing, where figure and landscape seep into one another and unsettle spatial perception.
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