Turrell states, in the third installment of the Art:21 television series that focuses on contemporary artists, that he wants “to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing,” one that is “like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.” Through the use of perceptual illusions, Turrell’s work is concerned with assisting in a viewer’s spiritual awakening through an experience that affects the body and the mind.

Koegel takes a route that is less abstract and reticent in appearance than Turrell’s installations by including imagery in his paintings that reflects a contemporary, industrialized world. Koegel hopes that his installation will not only create a perceptual, spiritual experience possessing some of the effects of a Turrell installation but to recognize that to be able to engage in this mystical context one must also recognize the affects that mankind’s mettle with natural materials has upon the whole planet and thus upon mankind’s character.

Koegel’s installation is a monochromatic, gray room in which the floor and walls are painted in a way so that the corners fade out. By removing the clues that provides one a sense of the room’s perimeter the walls can appear to have an infinite depth. Manipulation of the paint is the only special effect. There are no architectural alterations. The use of gray is a mid-value color that can suggest a kind of permanent twilight, capturing the viewer in between day and night. The transition from the white walls of the gallery entrance to the grey space will be streaked like the textured veiling in Koegel’s paintings. The streaks enhance the airiness in his horizonless landscapes and cause objects to appear to float in space. The effect of the absence of perceptual clues like the corners is akin to being within one of Koegel’s paintings. In this sense, you are inside and outside the space simultaneously. The streaks also suggest that the room has simply been dipped into paint, reinforcing the notion that the world that one is about to enter is one entirely made of paint, of imagery, and of illusion. It is an artificial world meant to help us see artifice as part of nature, but also to see the distancing effects that artifice can have.

Koegel is interested in how the landscape changes, but he does not suggest a cycle of death and rebirth, but rather one of constant change, never able to return to a prior state. Nature’s rules in Koegel’s work are ones of adaptation, metamorphosis, and recombination. Koegel’s imagery suggests that if any story is being told it is that the landscape is part of an organism in a state of entropy.

This is the oblique, big picture implied in his work. The specific imagery that Koegel has selected is one that clearly comes out of mankind’s manipulation of this environment. Koegel not only thinks about how people relate to and inhabit the space around them, but he also thinks about its commodification. It is a landscape of factory smoke and butchered trees. Yet the smoke belching from the smokestacks is stylized in a manner that suggests an intestinal track. The stumpy limbs and trunks of the butchered trees appear to have inner red color like blood that redefines them as arteries. It is a not so subtle representation of the connections between a human’s inner body and the outer body of nature.

This is well represented in one of the more recently completed works for Real Estate. Like the majority of the paintings for this show, CLXXXVII. Water, Sugar, Protein reveals Koegel’s recent introduction of figures in his landscape. In this case, it is an astronaut dangling in space with an extenuated air-hose. However, instead of hanging in a dark outer space, he hangs in an equally horizonless, baby-blue space. He could be in the sky or he could be underwater.

Like all of Koegel’s figures, the astronaut does not have a personality. Rather Koegel’s figures are meant to be symbols, details in the bigger picture of the universe. One painting has a black crow of death and another painting has figures that appear to be walking in a devotional manner. In Water, Sugar, Protein, the astronaut evokes the admirable human penchant for taking risks by entering new territory, but it is an inclination that can also inspire territorial instincts like capture-and-control in this “newly discovered” territory.

The surrounding, background elements of the astronaut suggest the belched, sulfuric clouds of volcano-like structures. They also bring to mind internal organs. In the sense, the astronaut becomes a fetus, and the air hose an umbilical cord, a notion supported by the title, Water, Sugar, Protein – the three nutritional elements necessary for living beings.

Despite the scenarios of showing the interaction between nature’s and man’s respective industries, Koegel does not elicit damning statements in his paintings. Rather he is simply observing the changing environment. He leaves it to the viewer to decide how they feel about the changes. In this manner, Koegel does best what painting can do, which is to be silent. Generally, paintings do not “speak” to the viewer directly. You have to interact with them intellectually as they are not time-based, so it is much harder to be passive in front them if you expect any sort of meaningful interaction. It’s the same with nature. Nature doesn’t speak to you directly. People have to project upon it and figure out how they see themselves in it.

Will viewers see themselves within a changing environment in the most natural sense as animals that live alongside other animals and plants? Will they also see themselves as being animals who speed up some of these changes with their smokestacks – constructed from the clay found in the earth – that like, volcanoes, are orifices providing entries into the bellies of very different but interrelated beasts? Highlighting this necessarily contemplative, perceptual, intellectual interactive experience with both painting and nature, per se, is Koegel’s intention for his gray, twilight, floating world installation.