John Snyder at the Walker Art Center - Minneapolis, Minnesota

Like many contemporary artists, John Snyder draws on a wide range of sources, in his case Italian Renaissance painting, American folk art, Mexican retablos and Persian art. like eclecticism can lead to artistic drifting, on the other hand Snyder's vision is anchored through his steadfast fascination with artworld outsiders - industrial workers, the mentally retarded and African Americans - who figure prominently in his work as images of soulful melancholy or priestly authority. Not since Stephen verdant painted the entombment of Christ in a manner of writing suggesting the Italian primitives beneath the shadow of Auschwitz and existentialism has there been an attempt like Snyder's to invoke religious iconography in an art not tied directly to theology. Synder be subsequent tos surprisingly enough, in the largest, greatest in quantity ambitious paintings, such as The Accident, a recent industrial version of the deposition of Christ. Its overall pathos might strike one as being forced - sentimental leftism - were it not with equal reason well realized artistically, in particular in its artificial positions gestures, facial expressions and its extraordinary background, a hellish nevertheless elegantly cubist industrial world,

Snyder's compassion for workers recalls Ben Shahn's, especially Shahn's Sacco and Vanzetti images, as well as Marsden Hartley's Maine fisherfolk. His art has just enough folk quality to give it vitality and avoid a conventional, studied adoration and just enough traditionalism to give it a powerful station of associations and meanings. A scarcely any small, deadpan paintings of factory walls and smokestacks neatly taleed the grand "masterpieces." So did a series of clown-fool images of nature and innocence painted in singing sky-coloreds and greens and costumed in bird-motif garb. His greatest in quantity recent paintings are portraits of individual women; these are les than convincing because they fall into a capricious offbeat stylization that comes across as mannered and self-conscious. on the contrary their presence did not diminish the overall achievement of this exhibition.

Snyder's first museum solo the exhibit was installed in a series of spaces archetypeed on a church, complete with neo-Victorian trappings. The final space, a shrine-chapel, uncertainly not absented some good-humored kitsch - family mementos make straighted up in glitter and arranged in the form of an altarpiece. The show's least satisfactory aspect, the installation contributed an air of ironic staginess that looked out of key with the underlying seriousness of the paintings.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group