ANNIE LAPIN – VARIOUS PEEP SHOWS
2014-01-13Lapin’s paintings appear to coalesce from the hazy set of information gathered at the corner of the eye. Her complex, dynamic compositions catalog her interest in the act of seeing and grapple with the process of how a painting comes into being through the viewer’s engagement with it. Whether exploring visual memory or the tension between the inherent properties of paint as material and its ability to depict, her work documents and dramatizes her own sense of flux at the edge of perception. Shapes and landscapes remain on the verge of resolution and legibility in a continual process of emergence, while also rooted to the thingliness of paint.
Various Peep Shows marks a shift for Lapin, whose previous work explored the vocabulary of Romantic and Rococo painting, to a new visual language. Quick, confident brush strokes appear to rest lightly on the surface of the canvas, operating as pure mark making until the slow burn of an image makes its way to the eye. Loose paint-handling and thin washes of color plot out strange architectures through which implausible landscapes peek at the viewer. Layers of imagery, rows of spray-painted lettering, and thick areas of paint seem to float at various layers in relation to each other, creating an odd spatiality.
While window-like vistas allow the eye to escape to deeper horizons, the shallow relief space that parallels the surface of her canvases serves as a stage for a re-enactment of the work’s production; choreographed pours, stains, smears and drips act as both deconstructive and constructive moments, as if paint intended to describe the world of the painting were also peeling up from the image, like an unstable element in a temporary collage. The resulting images appear to be simultaneously frozen in the entropic act of falling apart while they emphatically record the constructive painterly impulse. Ultimately, a poetic emerges out of this dynamic, which for Lapin, speaks to what paintings can and should be.
Opposite – Bi-cyclic and Tri-cyclic Romantics, 2009
Exhibition runs through to February 22nd, 2014
Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S. La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles
California
90034
