Benjamin Appel: Den Spalt zwischen Wand und Waschmaschine füllen. (S)

Starting point of Appel’s installations, paintings and text works are the physical space and the volumes in which people live: in rectangular rooms, with quadrangular windows, with square boxes, tiles, books and pictures.
In the transference into the artistic context, they serve as material and at the same time as a hypothesis about the realization of identity and reality.
Appel appropriates those forms and layers rectangles and squares on his canvases. Nothing representational can be recognized, rather the pasty color fields push themselves into the third dimension and tilt into the object-like. Deep blue, bright red and shining turquoise lie on top of each other. The severity of the form dissolves in the surface, in which the squeegee marks, lines and grooves reveal the viscous character of the oil color.
Appel’s objects are surfaces with right angles, too. A floating floor, tiled in white, interacts with the exhibition space and makes it part of Appel’s installation. The gap between wall and washing machine – this absurd non-space is filled by Appel with the question of how shape, place, experience and present correlate.

Benjamin Appel is currently showing a solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC) in Santiago de Chile, where he taps standard shower curtains into the room and along the walls, which with their peculiar materiality and graphic patterns transform the museum space into a complete installation. (June 28 – October 06, 2019, MAC Parque Forestal, Santiago de Chile, Chile.)