Real Estate

Jeff Koegel speaks with fascination about the Portuguese man-o-war jellyfish. It is, he explains, “not a single animal, but a colony of several different animals, each dependent on the others for survival.” He finds it amazing that these marine creatures find a way to assemble themselves into a working organism.

He could, in some sense, be talking about one of his recent paintings, which seem to be composed of disparate, oddly assorted, even sometimes seemingly incompatible but interconnected parts, each of which finds its place in the complex working of the whole. (Those curious enough to check out the jellyfish on the Internet will find that its long, descending polyps, when diagrammed, bear a remarkable resemblance to those ubiquitous tubular shapes that evoke trees or human internal organs in Koegel’s paintings.)

But let’s talk first about “Real Estate.” Because that was originally, and remains, the central preoccupation of Jeff Koegel’s vision as a painter, and it’s no accident of course, that he chose it as the title for the current exhibition. His earlier paintings invited us to contemplate acres of semi-abstract urban landscapes, industrial areas or abandoned drive-in movie lots, where empty space was given definition by the suggestion of hard-edge, architectural buildings, parking lots with multiple space divisions, billboards, swimming pools or concrete pits, chain-link fences... Subdued to the point of minimalism in both mood and palette, they often introduced a complementary note of the fantastic – even the spiritual – with curious, intricate glimpses into what lay beneath, or behind, their bland exterior surfaces. So we’re talking about space: how we occupy it, what it means to us and our sense of self within it, along with the deceptive, even illusionary quality by which what appeared to have a substantial presence in space will suddenly split open to reveal that it was not quite what we had thought. We’re talking about the illusion of material substance and the illusion of space, the constantly shifting ground of reality as we perceive it. These paintings challenge our comfortable notions about the reality of the material world.

Koegel achieves these effects like the Portuguese man-o-war. He brings things together, and pulls them a little bit apart for us to see where they don’t quite fit. He begins by laying down a background – in recent paintings, in intense and highly saturated color, reds and yellows – in tight, vertical striations whose sometimes deeply ridged, sometimes pitted textures offer an insistent, yet vulnerable curtain against which his images play out. Dredged down across the surface, the viscous medium intrigues the eye with its depth and density, its play between control and accident of medium.

Against these prepared backgrounds, the images surprise us with their play between the representational and the abstract, the real and the surreal. In CLXXXIV. Street Flower, for example, the trail of dark smoke from what appear to be old-fashioned factory smokestacks outline the silhouette of a Buddhist temple and, at the same time, above, morph into the lighted dome of some futuristic space-ship. Below, on another plane, two tiny figures (transported from another time, another place: a painting by Vermeer) converse, improbably, on an extended green fairway; and, to the right of the painting, the title’s “flower,” takes the architectural form of a street lamp, blossoming out of the truncated, quasi-artificial shapes of a grove of trees.

What are we to make of this cosmic, provocatively apocalyptic vision, which embraces the ancient, the historical and the contemporary in the same breath as some distant, unforeseeable future? The mind plays with notions of ecological destruction, of industry’s toll on the environment, the defoliation of the trees. The street lamp looms like some apologetic outpost of the civilization with which we were once familiar, while the “space-ship” leads the eye up and out, beyond the canvas, inviting – along with the spectral outline of that temple – some hope, perhaps, for spiritual salvation…

Okay, I understand that interpretations of this kind get fanciful, and that we risk ending up with your fancy competing with my own. And whenever we do get fanciful, with Koegel’s work, he’s always there to bring us back, gently but insistently, to the material reality of the paint. He’s content to play with our need to interpret, to catch the drift of his story, or a part of it, here and there; but when you get right down to it, he’s not really telling us a story at all: at most, he’s engaging us in his process, in the adventure of the paint.

Or the story, if it is one, is the journey of the eye. In CLXXXVI. Threshold of Liberty, one of Koegel’s most recent paintings, it starts, I think, where we feel most familiar. Ah, yes, we say: a house. A comfortable-looking sofa first attracts us, then unsettles us as we notice how the rug, below, droops like a Salvador Dali watch, and the wall behind is cut away to reveal that most private inner sanctum, the toilet (with paper, too, drooping down below the truncated floorboards. Behind, a door stands ajar, leading… into an ambiguous slice of light, seen nowhere else in the painting; and to the left, a broken stairway leads nowhere, and the interstice of a jagged wall leaves us wondering, is this the wall of the house itself? Or rather a passage into the surface of the painting? Do those strangely angled reflections of unseen windows, in the center and to the right, suggest the same: that the background is not a background at all, but the veil that conceals a reality either on this, the viewer’s side, or beyond? And what of that blue canopy that tents the disintegrating house? Another layer of concealment, through which we penetrate to get our fractured glimpse of what might be reality?

And the eye keeps journeying, guided here and there, as in all Koegel’s recent paintings, by dotted lines, guy ropes, ties, or simply drips of paint, tenuous connections – in the case of Threshold of Liberty to that symbol of liberty, the bird, perched atop one of those improbable, tubular trees, gazing out over the fragment of another blue canopy – another disintegrating house? – into the void beyond the painting’s edge.

Thus we get intrigued, seduced, deceived in Koegel’s work. Thus we get invited on a journey that has no goal, no explanation, really, but the mystery itself, on a path that leads us only to a new beginning, in some other place, where we stand again on the threshold – a different one, perhaps, and one that invites back into the painting’s surfaces for another tour of this enigmatic real estate.