"What is extraordinary is the mounting evidence of his keen sensitivity to traditional problems that are central to painting as an art. He demonstrates that those problems - and the contemporary visualization of solutions to them - continue to be at the heart of discovering what painting (now) can do. And what it can do is nothing less than to investigate the present conditions and historical conventions under which pictorial communication is possible."

Michael Schreyach
​"What Painting Can Do" (Excerpt)

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"Almost inadvertently, Reafsnyder has claimed gestural abstraction for California, where art was going when he started painting, and this changes the relationship between the painting and the beholder substantiality." 

Dave Hickey
"Michael Reafsnyder: Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" (Excerpt)