“Where the infinite meets the sublime”
a review of Kevin Palme’s solo exhibition : Paper Boxes
by Yu-Kai Lin, Kai Lin Art
photos:Valentin Sivyakov
What does it mean to capture the infinite? How can the documentation of a still-life of something as trivial as paper boxes become elevated to the extraordinary? When can play and work become so intertwined that the temporal becomes sublime?
Paper Boxes : Hexagonal Composition in Umber on Blues oil on wood panel 40” x 40”
In this latest body of work, Paper Boxes, a solo exhibition from Asheville-based painter Kevin Palme at KAI LIN ART in Atlanta, the artist explores these ponderances and seems to have captured the un-capturable.
To document is to record something in written, photographic, or artistic form; to provide information or evidence that serves as an official record. In this collection of twelve paintings, Palme chooses to document trompe l’oeil paper boxes with layers of oil paint, in a kaleidoscope of alluring and opulent colors.
Paper Boxes : Hexagonal Composition in Gray on Red oil on wood panel 40” x 40”
Palme’s deft use of pigments can be observed in the ombre background environments, allowing for the stacks of paper boxes to lift off the 2D canvas into an optical illusion of three dimensionality. The boxes compellingly pop off the surface of the canvas with astutely painted, photographic documentation. Each element is stacked in a haphazardly precarious, yet intentional formation as they connect at critical junctures. It’s as if Palme is saying “we are all in this together” as each box serves to further the next box in its contact.
Paper Boxes: Composition in Grey on Magenta; Composition in Clod Blue on Cobalt, Composition in Pink on Magenta, Composition in Sienna on Blue
These paper boxes begin to represent a society, a community, an individual. A delicate balance of souls in touch with one another, influencing and grounding with its presence. These metaphorical boxes seem to be saying “we all play a part of the whole, what holds us together becomes our purpose and place, in formation.”
What’s temporal and temporary in his painted universe becomes sublimely refined and permanent. Each box is exquisitely depicted in a uniquely weathered temperament: affected by its experience, altered by its existence, transformed by its connection.
Palme has raised the banal to the infinite. His obsessive concoction of varying degrees of linseed oil used to dilute oil paint allows for an ephemeral quality wherein the viewer doesn’t knowing where brush marks begins and where it ends.
We are left with an evanescence of a momentary glimpse in time. An encapsulation of the ephemeral, an elevation of the elemental, a capturing of free floating forms, weathered by time, eternally altered.
Artists are observers of life and of the duality of existence. Life is paradoxical in that way. Palme in his yearning for transience and documentation of the fragile and the impermanent, has created a meditative contemplation where the infinite meets the sublime.
