Kevin Appel’s earlier work, shown at the MoCA in Los Angeles in 1999, depicted a bright, light-filled home formed eerily out of flat shapes. With a cool California palette of creams, goldenrod, pale greens and baby blues, Appel played with the commercial appeal of a design-savvy 21st century domus as well as the cold, alienating quality of a post-human world. The painting series was as attractive as it was chilling. In his recent work, it’s as if those domestic spaces have imploded. Though the palette maintains the flat colors and design of his retro-future homes, their composition boldly veers away from figuration and into a formal realm of mythic-mathematics and smashed ideals.
Appel’s move toward abstraction is not a pure move, as he maintains some figuration—such as the sticks poking out of the his painted contraptions of depth, space, and material—but its presence seems to work as a counterpoint to the flatness at play within the scraps of color and pattern. These scraps sometimes resemble fragments of ‘60s commercial design, and Appel’s act of reappropriation makes them feel like shards of an obliterated utopian civilization with none of its color or idealism faded, just fragmented beyond discernible meaning. When Appel emerged from UCLA in the mid-90s a number of artists were dealing with issues of domesticity and design, such as Pae White and Jorge Pardo, and the same flat, cool palette could be seen in Brian Calvin’s wide-eyed twentysomethings, but Appel’s dramatic move forward into abstraction places him in exciting new territory.
