gary snyder

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Visual Absolute by Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is an expert in modern American art rooted in the 1920s to the 1960s.
His gallery Gary Snyder Fine Art, established in New York in 1990.
The essay Visual Absolute was written for the exhibition catalogue "ONE" in 2002.

As we move into the 21st century, artists are defined as much by what they don't do as by what they do.
This is particularly true of that small group of artists who embrace reductive abstraction, for, by definition,
reductive abstraction not only excludes representation, but excludes complex (i.e. decorative and expressionist) abstraction as well.

The history of reductive abstraction is esteemed. It begins in our modern age with Kasmir Malevich,
moves on through Ad Reinhart and Robert Ryman, and, as seen in this exhibition, includes the photographer
Anne Katrine Senstad. What is common to these artists and to this tradition is an embrace of, in the words of
John Golding, a "path to some new, ultimate pictorial truth or certainty, to a visual absolute".

In Anne Katrine Senstad's photography, this "visual absolute" is light itself. Whether materialized in the form
of portraiture,or, more esoterically, as subject itself, light is presented pure, as color dancing in cosmic vibration.
Lush and profoundly beautiful, her photographic paintings are powerful meditations on the spiritual energy that
forms our every moment.