Kevin Appel

About

Kevin Appel’s new paintings are built of fragmentary moments of reception and recognition. Initially constructed as studio-wall tableaux, these composite images were then re-photographed as flattened pictures. A visual world both printed and painted is hung loosely together throughout the exhibition, simultaneously suggesting someplace and nowhere, composition and eradication. There is a questioning back and forth, building up and blotting out forms, until a sense of controlled ruin is left behind.

Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, camo-cloth from an Arizona machine gun shoot, cut paper forms derived from Jean Prouvé’s temporary structures, paper shards, and raw wood and paint duck and weave throughout the paintings. The resulting body of work reshuffles, tears, and reconstructs forms derived from the initial composites—sometimes directly printing them in UV inks on the surface and sometimes implied through repetition of form. The space of the work folds into itself—creating both illusions and straightforward flattened surfaces.

The subsequent group of paintings grew out of this prismatic collage of new and old imagery to explore a complicated space of utopian collapse. The works are ordered chaos. The reclaimed landscapes depicted in the photographs break down into the essential patterns, tones, and textures, rhyming with painting and vice versa. This is an investigation into the connections between different visual systems and the story of collapse that appears at their intersection.