![]() The genealogy of the English alphabet begins with Egyptian hieroglyphics and continues through the Phoenician, Greek, and Roman alphabets, which would later evolve to become the Romantic languages and English. But even at this point, we might look further backwards-back towards the emergence of written language tout court. For instance, Kurt Schwitters’ Merz series (1923), constructed out of letterpress and lithograph portfolios, uses found words in collage form, acting as a clear milestone for the verbal visual of the mid-to-late 20 th century while dealing, head-on, with the printing press and its reticulated effects. This Enlightenment cultivation is deeply intertwined with that of the verbal visual. And thus, it is most fitting that Appel directs us by way of a literary painting practice. This kind of literary modernism opened the door for “the common” to be depicted in high art settings, paving the way for future movements like Dadaism and Pop Art. Of course, there is no one modernism but modernism s-for while, as far as the modernist rapprochement of subjectivity and historical situatedness may transpire with Manet’s 1865 Olympia, the modernism of the intellectual subject who frees herself from mytho-poetic trappings comes to bear with widespread literacy. Trekking back through the annals the emergence of the “verbal visual”, we see a notable development in tandem with literacy and its machinations the verbal visual can invariably be traced (like all contemporary art) to the birth of modernism and its coeval depiction of common subjects, typified by Dutch paintings of the working class (e.g., Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Peasant Wedding, 1567) and impressionism’s anti-classist mentality (e.g., Edgar Degas' The Laundry Workers (The Ironing), ca. But for us to arrive even here, let alone before Appel, deserves further elaboration. ![]() For instance, in Prince’s “joke paintings” we are made aware of the tenuous distinction between a written joke and a painting with the words and letters of the joke. Subsequent 20 th century artists like Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Prince thereafter took up the mantle, often prodding the practice into conceptual directions related to “rephotography” and toying with Danto’s well-known query regarding the status of art objects perceptually indistinguishable from their real-world counterparts. Word-based art, or what one might term the “verbal visual”, can take myriad directions and so it has before it arrived before Appel’s brush.Īs practiced in the 1950s and 60s by pioneers like Chryssa and Robert Indiana, pictography served as the critical fulcrum behind the verbal visual. ![]() These paintings, half action-painting and half history-writing, are difficult to anchor in any comparative mode and before further speaking of the paintings head-one, we must contextualize them historically. And it is this kind of abstraction that undergirds Appel’s recent word-based quotational paintings, an amalgam of prismatic plucks and prods (including cherry crimson, cyan blue, shimmering hoary white-cum-silvers adrift) that buoy the letters afloat.Īppel’s quotational paintings source from great avant-garde artists, filmmakers, poets, and musicians. For, under the auspices of so-called “expression theories”, the abstractionist projects their phenomenology onto the canvas as time passes-their drabs and whips of the paintbrush collecting movements coated in acrylic and quoting them against a tabula rasa that they posit in the shape of a dance of twisting images. But it is this engagement with time and its concentrated passage that also bridges painting and cinema-or, at the very least, when abstraction is concerned. Both involve movement, but in distinctly different directions-the filmmaker slows time down into a crystalline shape while the painter fights its shadow. After all, the former is an art of movement and time, prodded along via montage, and the latter is steeped in a process guided by gesture and material particularity. It is perhaps uncommon to quote a filmmaker when speaking of or working on the medium of the canvas, given the difference in medium-specificity of the two. So reads Brian Appel’s painting, Untitled (Jean-Luc), (2022 oil stick and spray paint on canvas 36 x 24 in). “Jean-Luc Godard used improvisatory techniques sometimes to observe reality, sometimes to impose his own vision, and often to interrelate the two so as to create a strangely abstract effect." BRIAN APPEL, "Untitled (Cruel)," signed, titled and dated on the reverse oil stick and spray paint on canvas 36 by 24 in.
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