Meir Appelfeld – Paintings

Édouard Manet’s assertion that “a painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds” is borne out by Meir Appelfeld’s recent paintings. These works depict modest subjects – landscapes, flowers, apples, still life, interior views – with a startling expressive power. Appelfeld’s paintings investigate a complex set of issues about form, color, and meaning, while evoking an intense emotional response in the viewer.

Eschewing the practice – common since the Impressionists – of painting on a white ground, Appelfeld covers his canvases with a warm imprimatura (transparent color), such as Indian yellow or burnt sienna. He then builds up layers of paint, being led from layer to layer as if working from “inside” the painting itself. The interplay between transparent and opaque colors is central to this process. This distinctive working method results in spectacularly luminous canvases: the objects appear to glow from within, as opposed to being illuminated by an external light source.

Nowhere is this effect more pronounced than in the series of paintings of apples, works that bring to mind Virginia Woolf’s diary musing: “There are 6 apples in the Cézanne picture. What can 6 apples not be?” This world of possibilities extends from formal issues to expressive content. Each of the apple paintings explores relationships of volume, perspective, and tonal values. Though relatively small in scale, these paintings possess a monumentality and drama reminiscent of baroque religious painting.

Appelfeld’s practice of portraying the same motif in numerous paintings reveals subtle calibrations of emotion. The artist evokes an animated universe where nothing is static. There are passages in a number of his canvases where the objects seem to coalesce from an inchoate jumble into solid forms as we move from left to right, or, alternatively, to dissolve into a kind of amorphous vapor if our eye moves in the opposite direction. These works reflect on the process of image making, on the way that an idea takes shape in the course of producing art: the conception of the painting crystallizes before our eyes.

Appelfeld emphasizes the interplay between the physical structure of objects and their spiritual expression. Revealing the inner meaning of the object lies at the heart of his art; the poignancy of these images derives from something within the objects depicted, but ultimately transcends them. Observing these paintings we experience the frisson of seeing something at once strange and familiar. This sensation is reminiscent of Marcel Proust’s description of the way in which objects can reawaken memories, enabling us to recapture our past: “The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling.” (Emily D. Bilski)