Kevin Appel transformed the main gallery space at Angles into an airy, light-filled modern domestic interior through the magic of traditional paint on canvas and linear perspective

Kevin Appel transformed the main gallery space at Angles into an airy, light-filled modern domestic interior through the magic of traditional paint on canvas and linear perspective. Four paintings (all 1999), one on each of the gallery's four walls, depict views from a skylit interior courtyard of an imaginary house designed by the artist and resembling the Case Study houses built in Los Angeles in the 1940s and '50s. Representing views toward the north, south, east and west, the paintings were hung on walls corresponding to these directions. The gallery space doubled as the courtyard, and the perspectival vistas were consistent with one another, especially as the viewer stood in the center of the gallery, pivoting to face each painting. Perspective, of course, is contingent upon the eye of the beholder; and this is painting that clearly takes respectful account of its viewers.With a pale, cool palette of blues, greens, creams and white, Appel delineates crisp spaces articulated by boxy panels, pillars and windows. Punctuating the multiple cubic spaces in the paintings are stylized trees; spheres made up of floating triangles painted in transparent greens and ochers sprout from flat vertical bands that signify trunks, though they are not rooted in anchoring pots or earth. Enhancing the illusion of space, the three-dimensionality of the trees' crowns also softens the planar quality of the architecture, while maintaining a rigid, unforgiving geometry.


Kevin Appel抯 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 揼round? 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.