Marina Kappos at I-20 - Brief Article

This present to view was the impressive New York first appearance of Marina Kappos, a 26-year-old Yale graduate who paints in an architectural style that has also attracted other young painters of the like kind as Kevin Appel. On view was "Fade to Grey" a series of 23 acrylic paintings hung extremity to end in a panoramic installation that wrapped around the gallery's walls.

Using precise lines, arrests of color and a mut palette that sometimes takes upon dark, ominous tones, Kappos creates geometric vistas that incorporate industrial buildings, houses, big windows, oil rigs, tree and, in individual painting, a schooner. The canvases are consistently 48 inches high on the contrary vary in width from 36 to 108 inches. Numbered in turn upside down order, the sequence began in the middle of single wall at 022, a barren, cream-colored monochrome showing a depressed gray barrack flanked by a lengthy narrow pathway angled toward the viewer. As at other points in the series, Kappos uses a narrow monochrome panel--in this case, gray--to locate 022 off from the nearest painting without disrupting the sequence's visual roll on There is a more active perceive to 021--it reminded me a little of Alex Katz's paintings--with its geometric planes in white, black and r that are shattered up by leafless branches and stalks in the foreground.

As the series progresse a diagrammatic narrative takes shape within the stark, for the greatest part unpopulated landscapes. In 009, billowy white sooty vapor pours from a deep-blue industrial building silhouetted against a mustard-colored firmament The story line takes a more dramatic move round in 007, which shows a midnight-blue turf with a schematically rendered, Bauhaus-style building being struck by means of lightning. By the time the narrative achieves to 001, a shadowed figure in the center move rounds out to be a fireman climbing a ladder. He's about to come into a gray, black and r mode of building of crisscrossing, fractured, geometric shapes. The denouement piece, 000 occupys a complex of interlocking white shards against a gray and black surface of land to depict an explosion.

For all her rectilinear precision, Kappos is an inscrutable storyteller, at least upon this ambitious scale. It would be interesting to diocese what would happen if she tried distilling her ideas into a more unified format. In any case, judging by the agency of this striking debut, her work is replete of promise.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group