Fresh Outlook: If you’ve ever cleared the...

Fresh Outlook: If you’ve ever cleared the furniture out of a room and given it a fresh coat of paint, you may recall how open, airy and expansive it felt before you moved the mundane stuff of your life back in. Returning to reality compromised the profound sense of possibility embodied by the newly painted room’s crisp, pristine emptiness.

Kevin Appel’s bright new paintings at Angles Gallery are poised on this moment of seemingly infinite potential. Bold, striking and tasteful, the young artist’s stylishly streamlined interiors are all the more remarkable for opening a fresh space for themselves in a genre otherwise cluttered with cliches--stale representations of claustrophobic rooms in which you wouldn’t be caught dead.

Appel’s two largest canvases each measure 8 by 12 feet and depict cool California homes, whose user-friendly floor plans and casually comforting palettes whisk you away into an imaginary land of easy enchantment. The weightlessness of outer space takes shape in a mid-size image of a floating flight of stairs, adorned by four similarly suspended monochromes.

Despite the flights of fancy Appel’s two-dimensional dream homes stimulate, they never pretend to be anything more than unattainable ideals. These light-handed paintings pay constant homage to computer-generated architectural studies and recap formalist abstraction’s obsession with framing edges, picture planes and their often celebrated breakdown.

Appel’s six other paintings focus on components often found in well-designed homes. Mod lamps, sleek cabinets, louvered windows, compact speakers and tidy bookshelves form neat, geometric compositions. Likewise, glass doors open onto landscaped backyards, where the leaves of neatly trimmed trees are symbolized by tiny triangles painted in a rainbow of unnatural greens.

Although it’s easy to see Appel’s paintings in relation to Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-book interiors, it’s more important to think of them in terms of Richard Artschwager’s resoundingly artificial sculptures. Both lure you out of your ordinary surroundings by drawing you more deeply into the delightful artifice of the everyday world.

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* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through March 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.