Kevin Appel at Angles - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Kevin Appel transformed the main gallery space at Angles into an airy, light-filled new domestic interior through the magic of traditional paint upon canvas and linear perspective. Four paintings (all 1999) individual on each of the gallery's four walls, depict views from a skylit interior courtyard of an imaginary house designed by the agency of the artist and resembling the Case inquiry houses built in Los Angeles in the 1940 and '50 Representing views toward the north, southerly east and west, the paintings were hung upon walls corresponding to these directions. The gallery space doubled as the courtyard, and the perspectival vistas were consistent with individual another, especially as the viewer stood in the center of the gallery, pivoting to face each painting. Perspective, of course, is contingent on the eye of the beholder; and this is painting that clearly takes deferential account of its viewers.

With a pale, rather cold palette of blues, greens, creams and white, Appel delineates crisp spaces articulated by means of boxy panels, pillars and windows. Punctuating the multiple cubic spaces in the paintings are stylized trees; spheres made up of floating triangles painted in transparent virids and ochers sprout from flat vertical bands that signify boles though they are not foundationed in anchoring pots or earth. Enhancing the illusion of space, the three-dimensionality of the trees' diadems also softens the planar quality of the architecture, while maintaining a rigid, unforgiving geometry

Like flatness and illusion, transparency and opacity, in these paintings engage in a seductive dialogue. Decorative panels of horizontal sky-colored rectangles, for example, obstruct visual access to areas in the depicted space, while taut trapezoidal planes of transparent color propose complex spatial layerings. Coincident with the picture plane in House: North View [i]or[/i] part of to the other Court, wide lightblue stripes exhibit the sides of pillars or range dividers, while further back in the space sum of two units decorative trees can be seen from one side faint green scrims. The right panel of this painting (which is compos of sum of two units canvases abutted and almost imperceptibly joined) is topped with a true pale green glaze of acrylic that is built up in layers to prompt the horizontal bands of a louver glass window, the greatest in quantity literal element in the work.

Ranging from flat and opaque to glasslike, Appel's acrylic paint is clearly hand-applied on the contrary with varying degrees of visible brushwork. Generally, the more transparent areas, of that kind as the tree leaves, reveal more evidence of the brush, while other registers are almost devoid of it. a certain number of sections are built up thus thickly with paint that they shoot forward outward a fraction of an inch from the canvas's surface. Masking tape was used more or les conspicuously depending upon the thickness of the paint, on the contrary its deployment was exceedingly precise. greatest in quantity striking in Appel's project is his impeccable craftsmanship. The assurance of his hand and the razor-sharpness of his straightedge are well suited to the anonymous, efficient mode of speech of the home of his dreams.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

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