Marty Schnapf’s “Vignettes” @ Perrotin, Hong Kong

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. Schnapf’s painted bodies often serve as somatic vessels for his uncanny abstractions: their forms contort, fold, refract, and disappear–gestures of material dissolution that tug at the veil between the real and surreal.