Kevin Appel’s Paintings Offer Insight From the Inside Out

The nine paintings by Kevin Appel in his small exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art are deceptively simple and exceptionally confident pictures. Appel, the 32-year-old recipient of the museum’s 1999 emerging artist award, sponsored by Citibank Private Bank, paints chilly domestic environments that are at once immediately recognizable, visually welcoming and vaguely ominous. They show us where we now live.

One painting dates from 1998; the remaining eight were made this year. Each depicts a modern interior in which crystalline geometric transparency prevails--planar walls, floor-to-ceiling windows, faceted light, a confusion between interior and exterior space. Rational articulation merges seamlessly with an odd sense of disorientation.

The recent pictures rely on a cool palette of transparent greens and blues, their razor-sharp edges often abutting pure white. Appel paints with acrylic on canvas that is pulled taut over a wooden panel, which gives a crisp firmness to the surface. Sometimes the acrylic seems to be mixed with a gel, which yields rectangular slabs of color that are both light reflective and absorptive. They have an optical depth that wavers between being illusionistic and actual.

Most of these interiors include views to the outdoors, where carefully trimmed trees are set in strict orthogonal alignment. Schematically rendered, like faceted lollipops, the trees are composed in an array of greens ranging from lime to hunter. These bits of nature feel highly unnatural, recalling period Modern sculpture circa 1960 (in the manner of, say, Richard Lippold or Claire Falkenstein).

A wall label at MOCA suggests an imagistic kinship to postwar Case Study House architecture, while painterly references to early L.A. Modernists such as Peter Krasnow could also be asserted. Yet, Appel’s references don’t aspire to that kind of transcendent purity; instead they possess a vernacular quality. The Case Study era recedes into the historical background.

The scale of the large works recalls field paintings (most are diptychs, the largest reaching 15 feet across). They require a lateral scan, like digital information being laid out on a screen. One result is that you don’t imaginatively project yourself into the space of Appel’s pictures; rather, each picture unfolds itself in front of you, like an elusive idea of domestic enclosure coming into perpetually uninhabitable view.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Jan. 2. Closed Mondays.

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Object Lessons: When is a sculpture not a sculpture? In the case of Joe Scanlan’s “Product No. 2,” currently on view in a small but complex exhibition at LACE, the answer is: When it’s being used as a bookshelf.

Maybe.

Or, then again, maybe not. Scanlan deftly shifts the question of art’s meaning away from static environmental context, where it’s usually located, and toward the varieties of human desire and the use to which objects are put. In his work, an object of contemplation (art) can be readily transformed into an object of functional use (furniture) and back again, depending on the shifting realization of your desire.

From the Bauhaus to Donald Judd, from Jim Isermann to Jorge Pardo, these slippery questions have attracted a variety of conceptually pungent artists. At LACE, Scanlan’s “product” is a Minimalist set of simple, nesting forms made of raw and painted planks. Stack them up and stabilize them with ingenious struts of twisted cloth, as they are in a front corner of the gallery, and they become a usable shelving system, perfect for storing books or the display of cherished mementos.

Or, stripped of knickknacks and carefully aligned to articulate the spatial axis of the room, the shelving becomes a modular sculpture. Absent any anthropomorphic metaphors, it’s classical only in its reliance on the Modernist grid.

A third version of “Product No. 2,” nested for storage and thus symbolic of our nomadic way of modern life, forms a pedestal holding a boxed set of 30 photographs from the past decade. The 8-by-10 color glossies show the shelving-cum-sculpture in a variety of settings, from shipping dock to art gallery, apartment bedroom to mail-order-catalog-style display.

The photo set is pointedly titled “An Investigation on the Role of the Consumer in the Interpretation of a Work of Art.” This witty bit of heresy forthrightly acknowledges the possibility that a moral foundation underlies commerce--which removes Scanlan’s art from the Utopian tradition established by the Russian avant-garde, then elaborated in the legacy of the Bauhaus and 1960s Minimalism. Scanlan rewrites for the marketplace an old Conceptual art dictum, so that a consumer--not only a viewer--”completes the work of art.”

Lest there be any doubt about this, the show comes with a nominal catalog whose design mimics October, the academic journal of establishment Marxist criticism. Bluntly titled Commerce, the provocatively written magazine is (not unlike the sculpture) one in a projected series.

Scanlan’s art product is a refreshing refusal of academic norms, which today clog many of art’s arteries and restrict the flow of cultural lifeblood. That he’s done it by turning the language of Minimalism against itself is no small feat.

* LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., (323) 957-9025, through Nov. 13. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

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Common Denominators: Steven Criqui’s new work is a conflation of several interests his art has shown in the past, including digital photography, the emotional weight of the suburban environment, commercial signage and painting as private and social sign language. At Cirrus Gallery, the result is a strangely ethereal group of nine mixed-media cityscapes.

Collaged and painted ink-jet photo prints are affixed to canvas. The subjects are intentionally bland--a nondescript house, a corner video store, some boarded-up shops, a mini-mall. They’re places we know well but where nothing of unusual consequence happens.

Criqui paints over sections of each picture. The pastel hues emphasize the sun-bleached haze of the L.A. environment, washing out the landscape even more, while elsewhere the use of earthy brown paint reads like an intrusion with a blunt instrument (call it noir). In sensibility the pictures loosely recall hand-painted photographs from the era before color photography, when the effort to inject a lifelike patina more often ended up as weirdly synthetic.

Sometimes the color obliterates a shop sign or billboard, sometimes it adds the silhouette of an agave or the long-gone Brown Derby restaurant. Painting functions as an erasure of the mundane, while the shapes that are added make no curative claim to idealization.

Indeed, there’s a quietly forlorn bleakness to this group of pictures, a sense of the grinding ordinariness of the everyday that vacillates between small pleasures and inevitable loss. They’re rather hard to look at, if only because they ring so true.

* Cirrus Gallery, 542 S. Alameda St., (213) 680-3473, through Nov. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Postwar Punch: More widely revered for his influence as a teacher than for his own abstract paintings, German expatriate Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) had a profound impact on postwar American art. (Among countless others, his students included Lee Krasner, whose retrospective is currently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.) An uneven selection of 29 watercolors, gouaches and oils on paper at Manny Silverman Gallery offers a nonetheless welcome opportunity to survey a wide swath of the artistic territory he covered.

Hofmann’s art is based on a faith in rigorous, internal pictorial logic, principally derived from three crucial precedents. To perhaps oversimplify, his art merged the firm, decisive line of Picasso’s drawing with the intense color of Matisse and the aqueous space of Miro. At its best, the result was a style of abstraction brimming with formal intelligence.

The show includes one Picassoid line drawing, circa 1932-1934, and a few early landscapes and cityscapes. It concentrates on later work, produced after Hofmann turned 60.

Most of the 1940s drawings date from the war years, when a sense of clanging mechanical machinery entered the pictures. Four more playful examples from the 1950s follow, including the delightful “Circus” (1954), in which tumbling color-forms emerge from blackness.

The dozen pictures from the 1960s show mostly diminished capacity (Hofmann died in 1966 at the age of 85). The chief exception is an untitled work from 1961; a glacial flow of brown, khaki green and yellow paint is tangled within a calligraphic web of black ink, creating a marvelous sense of elastic energy.

* Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, (310) 659-8256, through Oct. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.