An envelope painted on a small, white, cotton canvas (Envelope, 2025) reminds me of the successive updates applied to the term “realism” as it is used to evoke the relationship to the real in a given era or geographic location. Neo, new, hyper, artificial or even magical… The search for a prefix might serve as a central thread in defining Helene Appel’s work, though this thread would be far too monotonous, due to the multitude of disparate threads and fibers, thick or thin pieces of things, painted on expanses of canvas.

Since she began painting around 1990, and from 2005 specifically objects in their original size, Helene Appel has “placed” various objects, both organic and mineral, on stretches of canvas. Her works include vegetables, steaks, grains of rice and broken glass, all belonging to the gendered domestic realm—with regard to this, one might think of a key reference in the subject: Martha Rosler’s video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), in which the artist holds up and names kitchen utensils one by one. Yet Helene Appel doesn’t limit herself to the home; she also depicts objects from the outside world, both natural and man-made, such as trees and manhole covers.

Her work has a certain air of photography, or at least German photography. Just as Hilla and Bernd Becher photographed the facades of the buildings they cataloged head on, or Thomas Ruff captured the portraits of his models with the directness of a photo booth, Helene Appel never represents things horizontally, from an angle, in a corner or masked by any kind of shadow. In fact, she removes the portion of meat or salmon from its packaging and, through the magic of her transformation into painting, presents it to us in the most conspicuous way. Her work is a form of quest for objectivity in the sense that the object takes precedence over everything else, particularly over its context, which disappears to be replaced by the bare canvas. In this way, the viewers gaze does not have to wander through the pictorial space in order to find and connect various clues. The object immediately strikes the eye, like a reflection in a mirror.

In a recent text, the art historian Matilda Felix compares Helene Appel’s painting to scientific observation, making reference to a dissecting table. According to her interpretation, we should perhaps reconsider that of Lautréamont—“as beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”—and take it seriously. The dissection table of the scientist or poet—I would add the cook’s cutting board or the sandpits under children’s feet—are all work surfaces evoked by the backgrounds of the paintings, made from thicker or thinner canvases and always left visible. Physically present, they underpin the images, even if the objects vary. Or rather: the variation of the objects results in the use of a variety of canvasses, where the canvas background becomes the backdrop of the form—the background of the envelope is not the same as the background of the dishwashing liquid, which is again different from the background of the car headlight.

The omnipresence of the materiality of the canvas creates a distancing effect, in other words a departure from any possible trompe-l’oeil effect or a simple demonstration of virtuosity. In this regard, two paintings, one entitled Sandpit (2021) and the second Duvet Cover (2023) are particularly noteworthy. In the first, the expanse of sand reflects the backdrop in color, the dots representing grains of sand blending in with its intertwined threads. In the second, the depiction of woven material is superimposed on the actual weaving of the canvas. Both are reminiscent of the 1:1 scale map in Lewis Carroll’s novel Sylvie And Bruno Concluded: “We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to a mile! […]. The farmers objected; they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So, we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.” Just as in Carroll’s work the map brings us back down to Earth, in Helene Appel’s work, the object permits us to rediscover the background canvas, which, from being the most literal component becomes the most metaphysical. Perhaps here the background is the real subject, a background which brings everyday life into dialog with the history of painting. This history that Helene has inherited but updates, with a gesture as radical as the one we might imagine as she tears open a packet of spaghetti, before throwing a few strands onto the surface of the painting.

— Vanessa Morisset