Joan Snyder : Earthsongs Solo exhibition in Paris
By Vincent Delaury
The Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais gallery is hosting "Earthsongs" ("Chants de la Terre"), the first solo exhibition in France by Joan Snyder. At 86 years old, it was more than time for this major figure of American painting to finally receive such recognition in France. Bringing together around twenty paintings and works on paper displayed across both floors of the gallery, [...] the exhibition features the artist's most recent creations, all produced over the past year. For more than six decades, Joan Snyder has explored a territory where abstraction never distances itself from intimate experience. Often thickened by a generous impasto that literally overflows from the canvas, these new works extend this exploration with undiminished intensity. Suspended between the organic and the spiritual, between bodily memory and a form of transcendence, they confirm the singularity of a body of work that has profoundly revitalized the language of abstraction.
For Snyder, abstraction is never a purely formalist exercise; it is the site of a personal narrative. Each canvas is akin to a journal page where autobiography feeds the artistic composition. [...] Often described as autobiographical or confessional, her textured, matter-based paintings actually belong to a vaster space, where individual experience merges with shared narratives. Through a constant engagement with materiality, color, and sign, Snyder expands the field of abstract painting and influences several generations of artists. [...] The American artist Joan Snyder, with her splendid and adventurous "Earthsongs / Chants de la Terre," holds nothing back. Time suits her well! Sure, we just lost the great, eccentric British Pop artist David Hockney (1937–2026), who left us at 88, but Joan Snyder—very much alive!—is quite something too. And there is, quite clearly, in both of these Anglo-American painters, the same shared pleasure in the indulgence and love of painting, whether in its making or its contemplation. It is fluid, in a Color Field way, yet painted, even structured. [...]
This wouldn’t have pleased the modernist critic Clement Greenberg—but who cares!—who, in his day, criticized Pollock, the king of dripping, for incorporating cigarette butts, dust, or ash—elements of reality he deemed too trivial—into his abstract color fields, which he believed were supposed to be "pure" and entirely free of figurative cues. Here, low materialism rubs shoulders with high artistry. It’s fresh. It’s wet paint. You wish you could watch her paint, see how it germs in the studio, balanced between a celebration of the living world and the unconscious psyche. [...]
The result? Thick, fatty paintings, where the black sometimes becomes deliciously viscous (looking like tar), where flowers—at times deathly, though you might also stumble upon lollipops that look coated in lip gloss, already licked—proliferate, where color overflows, and where matter takes power. You don't contemplate them religiously from three meters away, hands behind your back. You cut through them with your gaze, you skim right past them, you touch them with your eyes like Doubting Thomas, you absorb them physically. You revolve around them, you swirl, you do the moonwalk (stepping back to move forward, gaining perspective between retrospective and prospective), and you walk away only to return, skimming the pothole-nest of a canvas with a stealthy eye that has transformed into an egg: it creates too, making the painting... beautiful. The scales dictate movement; the retina follows, and so does the body.[...]
Ultimately, these works appear as fragmented hymns, both dark and luminous, attempting to articulate life in its most elemental contradictions: impulse and entropy, blossoming and wear. At 86 years old, Joan Snyder pursues a style of painting that does not slow down, but continues to expand, to accumulate, to breathe.
[Translated from French]
