Stefanie Patruno
Walls separated from floors, angled layouts, ceilings that float on tables, dreary concrete surfaces, second-hand furniture stacked high mutating to become something else: a pedestal. In such exhibitions, for the artist Benjamin Appel, colour and material are of primary importance – deconstructed, subjected, drawn out, turned upside down and all limits removed to leave: space.
The focus is his relationship to surface, material, and colour, in front of a backdrop set by the question of how space can be formed and structured from these constituent elements. With its pure, geometric organization his exhibitions can seem static, austere, unsettled, but they are also full of energy and somehow poetic. When one enters these three-dimensional image spaces created by Appel, habitual visual systems of coordinating ourselves in space slip to form variables that are dependent on diverse artistic states of being – in order to seamlessly weave them together the artist builds a creative tension between sculpture, everyday objects, installation, architecture, painting and film.
At this point we are already inside, and thus part of, Benjamin Appel’s multi-dimensional image spaces, that in turn enter into a relationship with the larger composition created by space, the material compositions on the wall, even with his serial oil paintings or moving video images.
The exhibition titled Flowerbed in the Cellar, 2017 at PIFO Gallery, Beijing effectively demonstrates how the extant walls, breaches and paths, the horizontals and verticals, can be woven together with contemporary materials, objects, and art works. Starting in the central room, the viewer meanders over several levels, through multiple image spaces visually tied to one another. By using the most unspectacular materials and methods Appel denies the possibility of a clear separation between form and space and thus, it is just as impossible to establish a clear categorization of the genre-form-transcending image-space amalgam he creates. This complicates not only the clear location of objects in space, but also the positioning of the viewers in that space. They are without orientation in this new visual experience and experience of space.
Located chronologically between constructivist utopias, minimalistic gestures and the here and now, with Flowerbed in the Cellar, Appel creates fragile, but also sensual, in part even frightening models of space. Using newly constructed concrete, plaster, and metal surfaces, 15 geometric, abstract paintings as well as text and video works, the artist balances the abstract meaning of space as concept, location and material.
In this way, the foyer space on the gallery’s ground floor is dominated by two rectangular surfaces, which destabilizes the three-way relationship between walls, ceiling and floor due to their size, mass and material. All practical functions are removed, when the rectangular surfaces installed at various heights jut into the respective adjacent space and in that way, produce a connection with the next room. Simultaneously heavy and floating, the smooth slabs of plaster compete with the porous concrete surface for supremacy of the space. Several metal objects that have come from a former poultry farm carry the fragile, five-meter long plaster surface. Completely removed from its actual origin, this central element structures the space and confronts the viewers with real and fictive images of space and surface.
In this way, the material, interventions and effects – strictly oriented by form – unite all of the essential sculptural principles and methods that have been fundamental to Appel’s work since 2009. The clearly defined relationship to the location of the presentation is one of his central artistic strategies. The association to space as a conceptual starting point can make the real location become an artistic one in which all of its elements are equally integrated. All of the sculptural visual spaces that Appel has installed in a specific place become a unique and unreproducible event.
However, Appel’s materials are clearly not ‘art’ in and of themselves. They are set pieces from our everyday lives that unwittingly – when placed in the gallery, the studio, or the museum – become a part of new events with their rather recalcitrant allure. The seeming contradiction between formal clarity and content-based openness is consciously balanced by the ‘spatial artist’ with the use of highly contrasting materials and material qualities: transparency versus the opaque, brittleness against softness, bright colours against dark. Industrial products meet intellectual styling, inserts against breaches: a calculated interplay of materials and methods with which the transformation of the concrete space and the perception of it is created. This steers the viewers’ attention towards questions of: material and rhythm, colour and form, gravity and mass, geometry and lines.
Again and again, Appel transports the reality of the pedestal back to the sculpture. But then he steps out from behind the utilitarian, service-function and fuses the elements with the room to create an amalgam of forms, like in the exhibition Filling the Basement with Concrete[1 Benjamin Appel, in the exhibition catalogue Den Keller mit Beton füllen (Fill the cellar with Concrete) Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen am Sonntag, 2017], 2017. In that presentation, the placement of individual elements, extending over several rooms, was based on strictly oriented right angles. Developing this idea further, the rectangular room is also at the centre of the exhibition Flowerbed in the Cellar at PIFO Gallery. As a constituent element of our technified and clearly structured everyday world, the right angle is further illuminated as a part of a larger experiment. In this way, the strict organization of all spatial elements in the gallery are reflected in the right angle and its surfaces articulated in the room, even in the painting with the title Putting the Table in the Corner, 2015-2017.
The right angle already forms a central visual motif in the works and extends also into Appel’s paintings – fields of various sizes and colours overlap and condense into multiple layers of paint. Thus, the almost 100 superimposed right angles are the result of a process of convergence towards the phenomenon of spatial structures on the levels of the image-space. Like a reservoir of ideas, the abstract compositions transmit between the spaces, architectural constructs, everyday objects as well as the video work. Even the video unmistakably refers to the right angle as a returning organizational format that cultivates natural life forms itself: fish swim circles in the right angles spaces created by various aquariums, with in turn refers to a text on the wall that searches in vain for explanations for the meaning and function of rectangular aquariums.
Sculpture has experienced enormous developments like no other artistic form. More than any other time, during the last 20 years it has experienced an unprecedented renaissance as an artistic form of expression: today sculpture expands its borders in all directions. Today sculpture is allowed to do everything and can do anything! If one understands the modern period in the first decades of the 20th century and then the 1960s as a starting point of this upheavals in art, Benjamin Appel’s work can be viewed as sculpture of the most recent generation. As an artist, and since the earliest part of his career, Appel has transformed the demands of sculpture as a practice, questioned, radicalized and reinterpreted them.
His sculptural image-spaces, which can be encountered in the exhibition Flowerbed in the Cellar, can be seen as the systematic extended development of its previous exhibition-projects such as The Bird in its Nest, Filling the Basement with Concrete[2 Benjamin Appel, from the exhibition catalogue Den Keller mit Beton füllen (Fill the Cellar with Concrete) Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen am Sonntag, 2017
] or Walls are Stairs without Floors. Through the strict network of relationships that Benjamin Appel creates between a location, objects, and viewers, he suspends the architectonic connections and forces us to recognize and accept the instability in our spatial experience. What makes up the quality of this spatially defined total work of art is that it is not about seeing the familiar in a new way, but rather always counters our fundamental yearning, thought for spatial anchors, with a firm and clearly defined artistic form.
July 2017
