Kevin Appel

Stemming from his interest in architecture Kevin Appel’s paintings visually reassemble built environments as abstracted motifs where swatches wood grain, wallpaper, and Formica patterns overlap and collide in constellations of disordered perspective. In contrast to Cubist collages where real materials were inserted to disrupt painterly illusion and images were fragmented with multi-angled view points, Appel’s paintings readily embrace the limitations of the two dimensional picture plane. With their décor colours, obsessive patterns, and exaggerated cartoon flatness, Appel’s paintings celebrate the internalisation of the manicured image. In transforming the solidity of architecture into kaleidoscopic fields, Appel’s paintings allure with a provocative tension as prefab components pile in replication of urban density or suburban sprawl.