KEVIN APPEL: Intervals

"Since his 2023 exhibition at the Miles McEnery Gallery, Appel’s paintings have pivoted from intricate, densely patterned surfaces toward an airier treatment of color and line. Although he maintains his interest in the grid as a basis for organization, the paintings have become more open. He explores the defining organizational system through a sophisticated and restrained choice of colors. In some of the paintings, the patterned area recedes while the variation of a single color comes forward. For example, Untitled (3 Bands Sienna/Indanthrone) (2025) is structured into a block of sienna and a block of blue, with a restless strata of loose yellow, blue, and green lines standing between them…The walls of sienna and blue close in on the flurry of stains and casual drips that keep the two colors apart. Viewers seem to catch a last glimpse of the painting’s vibrating interior."

- Bridget R. Cooks in "Kevin Appel: Once Opened"

"In Untitled (5 Bands Mineral Wash) (2025), the top two registers are structured into long strips of pale grayish blue. . . Although the marks are made from repetitive gestures, each stroke is a unique combination of translucent paint layers that texture the surface like ceramic glaze. Like clay, the surfaces want to be touched. In turn, viewers want to find out if what reads as texture is haptic or is a smooth impression on a polished surface. To experience the entire painting, viewers must focus on the lines that claim the shallow surface of the picture plane and then refocus to see beyond the painting’s skin into open space. The contrast between the strokes that travel across the surface in the registers below and the illusion of depth in the misty bands above is a negotiation that the viewer both witnesses and enables."

- Bridget R. Cooks in "Kevin Appel: Once Opened"

"'I’m working with pigment dispersion. Basically, a pure liquid pigment, and I mix in different binders depending on how dense or open I want the layer to feel. The binder shifts the body of the paint, how it settles, how much light it holds. It’s a very immediate material. There isn’t a lot of hiding with it. I’m also doing a lot to unsettle the surface before it dries. Wiping, spraying, lifting, sometimes just letting gravity move things around. The paint stays active only briefly, so the timing becomes part of the process. Partially because of this, I work in smaller modules that build to a grid-like structure. It's changed how I work. The material demands a kind of responsiveness. It pushes back, it misbehaves. That unpredictability is what gives the surface its life.'"

- Kevin Appel in "Flow: Kevin Appel in Conversation with Bridget R. Cooks"