Indefatigable is the first word that comes to mind when looking at Annie Lapin’s new paintings at Honor Fraser. These canvases possess an energy so relentless it begins to feel a bit suspect — more affectation, perhaps, than affect. Many of the surfaces are busy in the way everyday, plugged-in life is busy, with an unproductive, self-important freneticism that feeds on itself, regenerating with false urgency. And yet, on plenty of occasions in this show, that urgency does feel real and wondrously integrated: mind, motion and matter in sync.
Lapin earned her master of fine arts degree at UCLA in 2007, and before that studied archaeology as an undergrad, noteworthy in that she takes into account a long history of art-making and her work presents itself as a record encompassing multiple strata of effort. Both the broader history and the individual record are given as unsettled — data, marks and meanings densely layered but ever in suspension. This tumultuous realm has something in common with the loosely narrative, action-packed canvases of Iva Gueorguieva, also L.A.-based. Both painters thrive on subverting resolution, purposefully denying fixed understandings of their imagery to echo the way certainties are denied to us in the larger scheme of experience and perception.
In her earlier work, Lapin often incorporated human figures within the unstable settings. The figures are now gone but the instability remains, a formidable force that proves seductive at times, and at others lapses into a murky, anarchic mess. When Lapin finds the right balance between chaos and coherence, the results are deeply absorbing. “The Frozen Aftervisions of Virtue,” for instance, is all motion and surprise. A luscious, birdlike burst in the center sports painterly plumage in glowing sunset orange, plum, mauve, olive and sienna. Perhaps that’s a sky in the distance, perhaps not. There are areas that suggest a cage or a window. In the few spots where they appear, flat opaque streaks of gray insistently cancel out the illusion of receding space.
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