I am a big fan of this artist, who only gets better and better as the years pass. Had the pleasure of visiting Kapp’s latest installation of work completed in 2008 at the opening in Santa Monica last night, and found the canvases as durable and surprising as ever. His colour palette evolves with deep layers of paint, scraped back, overpainted, rubbed out again, an archaeology in nuances of cool blues, greys, mauves, taupes, contrasted by piercing stabs of oranges and reds. The theme image, Square Crowd, is a tour de force of gestural paint applied in large scale—too late to grab it, as it quickly sold—though Chinatown (Age of Man), a 60-by-48-inch allegory has seductive content and some racy visual wit along with an adventurous composition. There’s a fine, small work just to the left of the entry, which could easily have been painted by an AbEx artist, if it didn’t have the solid trappings of figuration. Mostly it’s a colour field painting in modest scale, and a super bargain for a work by one who counts NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as a collector. There’s still time to look at the show, which stays up until February 21.—Stanley Moss

Ruth Bachofner Gallery
2525 Michigan Avenue, Suite G2
in the Bergamot Station Art Center
(adjacent to Santa Monica Museum of Art)
Santa Monica, CA 90404
USA
Telephone 1 310 829-3300

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