Kevin Appel 2023 by Miles McEnery Gallery

APPEL’S ATTACHMENTS

By Molly Warnock

The images arrived by email, documents of works in progress. Studio views and frontal photographs showed mid and large-format canvases propped vertically on blocks or resting on the specially designed easels that enable the painter to silk-screen the supports in an upright position. One painting featured circular forms—most strikingly, a stylized sun— rendered in white on white; others displayed stacked tiers of irregular shapes in various colors, some geometric (a enuated quadrilaterals, trapezoids, and triangles, in some instances tending toward mere slivers), some more organic in feeling (curving, leaf or ﬂame-like components). There were visible repetitions of certain elements and sequences, whether within the same work or from one painting to the next. The details, meanwhile, disclosed untold strata of superimposed pa erns: stripes, dots, grids, and ﬂecks; the telltale grain of dramatically enlarged photographs. The layers ranged in translucency from milky veils to near-opaque laminas. Or so it all seemed on the computer screen.

Kevin Appel’s paintings are distinctive physical objects, prepared to exacting standards and built up over a period of weeks or months. The canvases, which are frequently life-size, or larger, are mounted on panels and primed with gesso to a porcelain finish; the subsequent paint coats, which in the present body of work pass from acrylic to oil, reveal a keen a ention to the specific material properties of each medium. At times remarkably abstract in appearance, with buried, barely visible passages alongside more immediately legible incidents, the results demand sustained, in-person engagement. But they insist equally on the fundamental transformation of objectivity itself in a world of screens. It is not simply that their making is based in and mediated by screens, though this is an important fact about them. It is also that they ask what it means for paintings to have objects today—a er the fantasy of pure form embodied in modernist abstraction, a er the semiotic play of postmodernism, a er the rise of digital technology. The figure of the screen is at the heart of this investigation. What that means, however, changes over time.

Two moments provide some sense of Appel’s path to date. In the first, the screen is architectural.1 The key objects here—at once the deep context and the clearest foil for the current work—are the large-format paintings on canvas over panel that Appel produced in 2011 and entitled Screens, following an earlier body of works on paper by the same name. These compositions inaugurated the procedure he was to deploy, with various modifications, for several years and in several series that followed. Having gathered a particular corpus of images—in this case, found photographs of nature from a Time Life book series familiar to the artist from his childhood—Appel enlarged those photographs digitally and used a flatbed UV printer to transfer them directly to the surfaces of his scrupulously prepared supports. The next step involved painting atop those images in such a way as to partially obscure the printed ma er. Gestural brushstrokes swirl and meander atop crashing surf and prairie grass; flatly painted shapes tilt in space or unite to form intricate overlays. The situation evoked by the la er, in the painter’s telling, is one of “looking through architecture out into nature.”2 That nature, moreover, is implicitly located in the past, distanced visually by the blown-up rose es of the images’ original—and now long outmoded—printing technology.

It is telling that the collage-like forms that compose these screens especially recall Russian Suprematism and Constructivism, as if taking those movements as metonyms for “nonobjective” abstraction more generally. Superimposed upon images of the world that those visual systems ostensibly failed to transform, the screens initially appear merely to divide us from that world, both spatially and, as it were, temporally, the frontal shapes as if frozen in a perpetual present. Yet the se lement of screen and object quickly proves more complex: first, because modernist abstraction, too, is among Appel’s most-cherished “objects;” second, because the screens are not indifferent to the imagery below them but are visibly responsive to it;3 third (and most important), because the photographs, too, are so many screens, their mediated status clearly flagged. This is not a screen versus a world but a world of screens.

The second moment is that of the 2017 Composites. To make these paintings, Appel collaged together found images and photographs he had taken himself. These referential elements were integrated into layered, sculptural conﬁgurations produced by bending and twisting the various paper supports, some involving quasi-Matissean cutout forms. (These conﬁgurations were then photographed, producing new, two-dimensional images that Appel

1. A fuller telling of this story would begin with some of Appel’s earliest paintings, the depictions of interiors based on houses designed with the aid of a computer. There, the screen was part of a working process that did not necessarily show up in the ﬁnal works. For reasons of space, I am jumping in at the moment the screen ﬁrst enters the picture. 2. “Kevin Appel Speaks at the Vermont Studio Center,” February 8, 2016. h ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvKpJHE0W1s&list=WL&index=63&t=2s.

ﬂatbed-printed onto canvases mounted on aluminum.) Among the cutouts, one in particular, conjures the artist’s earlier play with overlays: a sheet with large round excisions reminiscent of a Jean Prouvé screen. Once again, one has the initial impression of looking through something to imagery that is located on the other side. Yet the topology has become more intricate, for the rephotographed imagery, too, folds and curls in space, at times appearing less as a separate layer than as the screen’s inner lining.

The current work institutes a new paradigm, one founded on the explicit fusion of imagery and screen. As in previous series, Appel deploys various kinds of photographic source material, including images of—among other things—a wrought iron grill by Antoni Gaudí; shadows on a brick façade; a terrazzo surface; a concrete utilities cover glimpsed in the street; and aspects of Arcosanti, the experimental metropolis in the Arizona desert that Appel visited in both childhood and adulthood. Rooted in specific encounters with things in the world, the photographs have been divested of ready legibility in the course of their subsequent itineraries in digital space, where they have been variously cropped, blown out, and enlarged—reduced, in many cases, to something approaching abstract pa erns. Transferred to the surfaces of Appel’s paintings, these ghostly, grainy elements at times conjure simplified motifs present both in the painter’s earlier work and in pictorial modernism more generally, from cubism to color field. They nonetheless retain a diffuse indexical relationship to the surfaces and textures of the real—a sense of things seen,

3. In this respect, it is tempting to compare the Screens to the détourned paintings produced in the 1950s and ’60s by Asger Jorn and Enrico Baj, among others associated with the Situationist International. Executed atop found paintings, including academic landscape paintings, done by others, Jorn’s modiﬁcations o en interact with their substrate in suggestive and unexpected ways; Appel’s more painterly gestures throughout his Screens at times recall Jorn’s.

Le : Olga Rozanova, Non-Objective Composition. Color Painting, 1917 Right: Kevin Appel, Barn Owl 1, 2009

if no longer localizable. As contrasted with the substrates of the earlier Screens, however, these images are not clearly relegated to the past; rather, they a est to a more general sense of absence or separateness, one that now appears thoroughly mediated by digital technology.

Yet, it is here that painting’s own materiality comes meaningfully into play, bringing us back to a certain resistance or opacity proper to the medium. For, rather than printing the image on the canvas at the outset and then doing something to—that is, upon—that image, Appel builds up the current paintings through the repeated layering of the diverse elements via silk-screen (but not with silk-screen ink; the painter instead deploys acrylic and oil media for which the meshes are not adapted). Where previously the image was interrupted or obscured by overlying forms and gestures, the images in these paintings interrupt themselves; they get in their own way. That Appel is very o en working wet-intowet, or at any rate wet-into-humid, is also to the point: the process is both additive and subtractive in one and the same gesture, the matrix pulling up paint as well as laying it down.

At this stage, it is unclear how much, if any, of the source imagery will remain to be seen in the completed works. Appel has expressed the wish that the paintings might function similarly to the Brutalist structures he most admires, eﬀectively a aining something of the la ers’ “extruded monolithic sensibility.”4 This can sound like an old dream of modernism: the passage from representation to pure presentation, from seeming to being. Yet Appel’s a achment to Brutalist architecture might point us equally to an ethics of the “as found,” described by the scholar Ben Highmore as “an obligation to respond to the objective world, a responsibility to be responsive.”5 An entanglement, in other words, from which there can be no exit.

4. Personal communication to the author, November 26, 2022.

5. Ben Highmore, “‘Image-breaking, God-making’: Paolozzi’s Brutalism.” October 136 (Spring 2011): 95.

Molly Warnock is an arts writer, editor, and curator based in Baltimore, MD.

Aggregate 1 (dim token), 2023 Acrylic on canvas over panel 80 x 68 inches 203.2 x 172.7 cm

Aggregate 2 (clot), 2023 Acrylic on canvas over panel 80 x 68 inches 203.2 x 172.7 cm

Aggregate 3 (cascade), 2023 Acrylic on canvas over panel 70 x 60 inches 177.8 x 152.4 cm

Aggregate 4 (solarium), 2023 Acrylic on canvas over panel 80 x 68 inches 203.2 x 172.7 cm

Aggregate 5 (blue facade), 2023 Oil and acrylic on canvas over panel 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

Aggregate 6 (bulwark), 2023 Oil and acrylic on canvas over panel 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

Aggregate 7 (autumn), 2023 Oil and acrylic on canvas over panel 70 x 60 inches 177.8 x 152.4 cm

Aggregate 8 (night occlusion), 2023 Oil and acrylic on canvas over panel 70 x 60 inches 177.8 x 152.4 cm

Aggregate 9 (slab), 2023 Oil and acrylic on canvas over panel 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

Aggregate 10 (burnt arrangement), 2023 Oil and acrylic on canvas over panel 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

Aggregate 11 (rose veil), 2023 Oil and acrylic on canvas over panel 80 x 68 inches 203.2 x 172.7 cm

Aggregate 12 (passage), 2023 Acrylic on canvas over panel 80 x 68 inches 203.2 x 172.7 cm

KEVIN APPEL

Born in 1967 in Los Angeles, CA

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

EDUCATION

1995

MFA, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

1990

BFA, Parsons School of Design, New York, NY

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2023

Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2018

Miles McEnery Gallery at The Art Show, New York, NY

2017

“slip collapse then and,” Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2016

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY

2014

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY

2013

Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2012

“Paintings,” Susanne Vielme er Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA

2009

“Drawings,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA

2008

The Suburban, Chicago, IL

Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand

2007

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY

2006

Wilkinson Gallery, London, United Kingdom