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.

Water, a primordial element and a symbol of the abyssal fluidities of the subconscious, features prominently in these paintings. In the largescale 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. The roiling water threatens to submerge their vessel–an indelible moment from the artist’s past. The Grateful Swimmer, one of the more abstract paintings in this series, similarly depicts a figure afloat in a glistening sea. The water laps at the edges of their body, creating a corporeal tide line that subtly blurs any perceivable threshold between the two. Likewise in River Crossing, the body of a male figure–folded into a cryptic knot of limbs and perched at the edge of a shore–is overlaid with midnight-blue brushstrokes reminiscent of water, a gestural decision that both merges the figure with and distinguishes it from the lighter oceanic tones of the painting’s background. Here, both figure and landscape seep into one another, disassembling perceptions of space, place, and time. In each of these works, Schnapf’s painterly renderings of water harness its undulating and illusionistic qualities: as the compositions gleam, shimmer, and reflect, his viscous and prismatic daubs of paint channel the elusive, mercurial, and life-bestowing properties of this primal liquid, anointing it as subject, material, and metaphor.

Schnapf’s paintings are peppered with other allegorical emblems as well: a soaring hawk, a carved mask, a company of parrots, a phone booth, a passing train, enigmatic cowboys, fractured architecture, entangled bodies, and a regal mare in a flooded St. Mark’s Square. If these collected motifs comprise a coded visual language–cryptic symbols sprung from an elusive psychic space–then Forager functions as something of a cipher. In this piece, one of several more intimately scaled paintings that mark a new direction in Schnapf’s practice, a bent figure, visible only at the limbs, grasps a stick and prods at a small well in the earth, sloshing the sky-blue water accumulating inside. The figure’s arms appear to multiply and merge with the painting’s verdant background, as if the composition apprehended an optical glitch frozen in time. If we could wade into the aqueous portal analogized by the forager’s earthen well, perhaps we would be transported to the velvety, mountainous darkness that envelops The Room Opened and the Night Poured Through, where a semi-nude woman (her back to the viewer) appears to emerge, Venus-like, from the fleshy plum folds of an orchid. The presence of this bloom is merely a mirage, an illusion created in part by the mirror image of the woman’s duplicated body lying prone in the composition’s foreground. A subtly painted halftone texture hovers over this composition like a gauzy screen, visually alluding to modes of physical and psychological distortion.

Another vignette, Pensione 3 a.m., is one of the few paintings to capture an interior space, shattering its linear logic and further emphasizing warped topographies. Here, as if in the throes of a hallucination, a female figure enrobed in a towel stares down at the viewer from the top of an incandescent stairwell, which heaves with interlocking geometric forms that appear to be simultaneously concrete and ephemeral. Much like the forager excavating the well, this figure’s act of investigating an inscrutable and uncanny passageway serves as a metaphor for the metaphysical choreography of painting itself: it ushers us–both artist and viewer alike–into a boundless thicket of fabled worlds.

The scale of these smaller paintings, all roughly the size of standard windows, further perpetuates this notion of the canvas as a permeable boundary between discrete imagistic realms. In Schnapf’s exhibition as a whole, boundary lines and edges–such as the space between bodies, or the liminal threshold between hallucination and recollection, figuration and abstraction–frequently melt and dissipate, suggesting a fluid exchange of energy that eschews static inertia. The abstract brushwork that both undergirds and overlays his carefully rendered compositions materially reinforces this visual and conceptual slippage, imbuing his paintings with a rhythmic gestural cadence. Taken together, Schnapf’s collected vignettes mine psychic and somatic notions of chance, mystery, and indeterminacy: his paintings assert their multiform sites and subjects as allegories for the lyrical hunt for meaning within the creative subconscious, where “distortion”–as Schnapf remarked to me–“can be more beautiful than clarity.”