Current Exhibition

Kevin Appel

SELECTED WORKS BY Kevin Appel

ARTICLES

Kevin Appel

Kevin Appel's paintings for the past ten years have addressed the relationship between physical space, architecture, and the painted image. Currently, this interest has turned toward representing an illogical relationship between an iconic architectural representation of a home and its natural surroundings.

Gravity has given way to a cataclysmic albeit humorous amalgamation of American vernacular architecture and modern structures impaled by caricatured trees and logs. The house form is abstracted and manipulated; multiplied, overlaid and folded into itself to create an uneasy narrative of muscular upheaval. The current paintings follow an approximation of perspectival convention as it pertains to representation, but this effect is not tied to any outlying origin. The causal forms are primal structures--simultaneously recalling a child's drawing of home and the architecture of the American frontier.

They are both four-sided pitched roof structures and cobbled together shelters that are themselves still partly "of nature" or 'ground'. This sense of the figure being inseparable from the ground exists as a driving premise - an exigent proposal that is not entirely in a pictorial space, but exists as a philosophical position based in experience.
The architecture is caught in a moment of simultaneous becoming and dissolution.

The figure ground relationship is insecure. It is subject to the same forces of push and pull that have always defined the pictorial, but now in a way that bears directly upon our sense of being whole or fragmented, secure or vulnerable.

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Source: wilkinsongallery.com