ESTABLISHED ARTIST: LA artist Kevin APPEL at Christopher Grimes Gallery

Kevin Appel
September 13 – November 2, 2013
Christopher Grimes Gallery

LA artist Kevin Appel continues his magnificent journey with Perspective started in 1997 with a strong interest in interiors’ design.

If the purpose of former works was to reduce architecture to its minimum, in 2000 he excluded the “idea of home” using exclusively the monochrome on a virgin white as background. It was the series “House: South Rotation Red” were house were a just a pretext to the subject.

Then in 2009 he introduced the photograph as a background with his “Screen LA series” shown at ACME on which he put abstract geometric paint. It was like two different two worlds were laid one on the other, as required to cohabit.

This summer at Susanne Vielmetter a new exhibition shown a continuum of a series started in 2011 made of photographs of landscapes in dialog with painted geometric shapes that appear on the surface to interrupt or to emphasize the reading of the photograph.

 A new Battle of perspectives:

 

Here at Christopher Grimes Gallery’s new exhibition we have a totally new work. The artist has never been that far in the chromatic perspective.

This time photographs of tangle of rebars are used as background. The rebars are dark grey and taken in close-up like still life. As it is taken very close some wires some come out and other comes into the frame. Then another layer made of paint comes to cover that ground on the entire surface to interfere with previous layer.

 

On “Untitled (Rebar 1)” or “Untitled (Rebar 2)” (see above) Some white bar-codes prevent the background to come out and the reinforcing bars appear like the loser of the battle.

Untitled (rebar 10)
Courtesy Christopher Grimes Gallery

On the contrary on “Untitled (Rebar 1o)” a grid of black spots which is supposed to prevent the rebar is enhancing the rebars. Interestingly some rebars come out between the spaces given between the black spots.

A different reading of the artwork with the Internet

 

Regarding that specific black painting/photograph (left above) we can notice a difference of vision when we see it in flesh or with the Internet as an image. When the Internet tends to erase the details from most of the paintings with Kevin Appel’s black spot painting we clearly see a volume that would come out of the frame. When we are at the gallery it doesn’t appear as much as a sculpture as when seen as an image like above. Quite interesting.

A must be seen exhibition for sure. BCH