KEVIN APPEL – PAINTING
2012-07-30In his new work, Kevin Appel breaches new territory in exploring the tenuous relationship between the modes of photography, painting, and architecture and the incongruities that are produced at their collision.
As in earlier projects, Appel builds his compositions upon a narrative stream of constructing and dissolving architecture. For this series, he has moved from found photographs to those of his own, emphasizing his intimate relationship to the landscape in place of one mediated by an outside source. Appel’s photographs are of the Salton Sea, a complicated space of utopian collapse and a failed site of sorts. The photographs function as the basis of each composition – large scale images are being printed with UV ink directly onto the canvases which have been prepared with a porcelain finish. Acrylic, oil and enamel paints are then layered in complementary ways, creating a complex correlation between the painted and the printed surfaces. Evoking a sense of ordered chaos, the reclaimed landscapes featured in the photographs break down into the essential patterns, tones, and textures of painting.
“Paintings” is an investigation into the connections between different visual strategies and the story of collapse that forms at their intersection. Rooted in photographs that are compromised and compressed by paint, Appel’s current explorations evolved from the dissolution of the Pile Paintings from 2006. The exhibition pursues a trajectory of reassembly from that upheaval, where expanses of monochrome paint and intricate fields of textured abstractions push and pull against each other to shape a bittersweet optimism.
Opposite – “Salton Sea (heap)”, 2012
Exhibition runs through to August 23rd, 2012
Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
6006 Washington Blvd
Culver City
CA90232
USA
