Apartment.Gallery
Inaugural Show in Chicago's North Park
That gap between the door and the floor, a crack where crushed sun leaks in. This is what I see before entering Apartment Gallery. All I really remember about the stairwell is the muddy dark brown wood of everything, cut by hiatuses of off-white walls.
It’s an apartment but there isn’t any furniture. There are the paintings, and barely anything else to take in besides them. Two rooms with pictures: the living room and a small bedroom to the left of the kitchen. And in the kitchen there’s an orange slice keychain on a countertop. People huddle in two’s and three’s, their bodies become one big eye, with their heads the iris and turning peripherally. Then at the end of the night, everyone is crosseyed and bowlegged. Always one eye on the painting, the other on your interlocutor.
The show. Two painters unite. Kevin Larmee and Vogel Morra, hung and organized by Blaise — Kevin’s son, the cartoonist — in Chicago’s upper Northside. Kevin Larmee paints people, docks, water, sunless sky (the Beginning) and moonless sky (the End). And Morra paints people, flowers, vases, windows, fireplaces, chairs, and trees. Larmee and Morra’s paintings are joined by the grace and awkwardness needed to dance. Larmee favors blues and blacks, bruising the canvas as a necessary arrow of love. Morra: purples and pinks.
The opening is like this: a dotted line tracing a butterfly’s ditz through the sky.
It’s mostly Blaise’s friends here. They seep through the doorway, many of them seem to be meeting for the first time. Someone asks me what I do and I say I am an artist. It feels less embarrassing to say that here. I ask someone, ‘Are you a painter?’ A mawkish ‘kind of’ comes out of her mouth. Some of them are grad students at the University of Chicago, members of a Javanese gamelan ensemble. Spotted: Ash H.G., a cartoonist with a forthcoming graphic novel called East District. And
, the writer and internet anthropologist. The show’s artists are missing. “They’re both mysterious, so — “ trails off Blaise.
Paintings are the alignment of constellations, the flipping of a lucky cigarette into the first spot in a pack, stubby toes on crushed velvet. The fracture is fifty words for snow. Dipping a brush in dreamless water, shaping its hair into a fine cone. A brush’s bristles can be tweezed easily from hogs, sables, minks, mongooses, horses, ponies, wolves, sheep, rabbits, goats, camels, and oxen. The bristles are bred for this, a descending column of Kundalini blockages. A brush is vestigial. We can paint with slices of clementine if we weather the juice.
Larmee’s pictures are cosmic in subject matter but not in scale. There is a tiny importance to them, like a single petal or a Beanie Baby. When I said Larmee painted people, I include angels in this category. A redheaded angel appears opposite his depiction of two figures in silhouette, where one is leading the other through a building being destroyed in a fire.
Morra’s paintings are predominated by portraiture. The figures are nearly expressionless and anhedonic. It becomes increasingly important to the viewer to determine if the scene painted is candid or posed. Argument for candid: the space surrounding the figures is inchoate, tohu-bohu Rastafari. Argument for posed: Everyone who poses for Morra instantly become an image. Morra’s people scrape by with very little definition: a dot that’s an eye, a line that’s a mustache. The figures are saved from facelessness. It’s not anonymity, it’s privacy.
There’s mackerel, rice, beer, an idiom of wine whose name I can’t recall. Stephen tells me the name of the wine and I ask ‘Is that a director?’
The sun’s setting, each ray in danger of falling off the central axis. Larmee’s paintings illuminated in ring-like formations, the sun contouring each painting like melted popsicle circumscribing a mouth. The paintings are all surface: there is no pretense given to stain. It’s a painting. The application of paint is thick, white light is pressed and squeezed out between figures or waves.
Morra lets more light in. There are passages of color above solid blocks of pigment. The subjects of Morra’s paintings are alone. This painter favors the margin. Men sit in corners or against walls, ever brooding. Only the trees feel collective— as faceless, inconspicuous, upright weather vanes. The brushstrokes staccato across the picture plane, each tree having its own auric shield. A tree in the foreground, cooped in pinks. Morra’s paintings are all wall, retaining walls to be specific.
Rock-em sock-em puddles of grass indiscriminately line the bottom of Morra’s painting of trees. This is a terpene-lined pastoral. In the living room, Larmee’s dorky grisaille and oceanic ground respond in kind. The dharma of every picture is that each brushstroke precipitates on the surface of the canvas, foggy warm breath making opaque condensation drawings on the pane of the viewer’s mind.
People fall in and out of the apartment.
And there’s a declining population by 6:30. Conversation has given way to current events. I feel good, because I have talked to everyone there an adequate amount.
One last note: Larmee’s paintings are business-casual, Morra’s are a loosened necktie after a long day at the office. Morra’s paintings struggle to unmoor themselves, the untucked canvas looping around the picture plane like ice cream birthday cake frosting.
The opening’s over. Stragglers sit crosslegged on the floor or perch on the window sill. The sky is purple and blue allover, high noon finally celebrating its quinceañera. It’s getting late, people return to their lives. All we have left is a painting between us, a sick twisted jeremiad dedicated to autumn.
Apartment Gallery is an apartment and gallery on Chicago’s north side. Vogel Morra and Kevin Larmee ran from September 30th to October 23rd, 2023.
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