Review: Kevin Appel’s ‘Paintings’ pack punch at Susanne Vielmetter

Kevin Appel’s new paintings are at war with themselves. While that may be hell for the artist, it’s great for viewers: We get to watch as the talented painter goes back and forth between building taut compositions and blotting them out, leaving some shards scattered randomly and burying others under impenetrable layers of icy white paint. It’s a give-and-take drama whose quiet fury is fueled by a kind of decisiveness that brooks little compromise and takes no prisoners.

At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, each of Appel’s 11 new paintings begins as a pristine, porcelain-coated canvas onto which enlarged photographs get mechanically printed in ultraviolet inks. The photographs depict abandoned buildings, piles of rubble and other broken-down bits of detritus that Appel has shot around the Salton Sea.

In one sense, the ragged textures, fractured forms and splintered shapes of these contemporary ruins function like old-fashioned underpaintings, giving Appel the opportunity to paint subsequent layers whose nuance and richness build on what lies beneath them. But that’s not how the L.A. artist’s powerful paintings operate.

Viciously unsentimental, each added layer obliterates what came before it. Rather than allowing for slow-brewed developments, gradual growth and additive details, Appel’s impatient paintings go for slam-bang transformations: all-or-nothing gambits with no middle ground and very little past residue.

Despite being made with such low-tech materials as oil, acrylic and screen-printer’s ink, these ahead-of-the-curve canvases leave the subtle shifts of analog reality in the Stone Age. Their now-is-all emphasis propels our eyes into a future entirely defined by the whiplash instantaneousness of the digital world.

Each of Appel’s paintings stands free of its neighbors. No two cover the same ground. As a group, they efficiently survey the various ways paint can be applied to canvas — by brush, knife and squeegee, as well as sponge, rag and hand. More important, they catalog the various ways we look at the world — on screen, in print and in person; scanning, staring and reading; abstractly, intimately and imaginatively.

Bluntly titled “Paintings,” Appel’s exhibition consists of the prettiest, most sensitive scorched-earth abstractions out there. Their passionate detachment is impressive and frightening.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 6006 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 837-2117, through Aug. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.vielmetter.com