Nature abhors a vacuum. “I am nature,” declared Jackson Pollock. Ipso facto, Pollock abhorred a vacuum. Atanas Karpeles must reason similarly; like Pollock’s painting, Karpeles’ brims with detail, covers every given inch of picture plane, and eats up one’s field of vision with its expansive cascade of dizzying incident.

Karpeles’ vision is kinder to the eye than was Pollock’s, his visual wit less sardonic and self-critical. But beneath the paroxysms of luminous color and forms bobbing in the vortex, the same existential anxiety that drove Pollock drives Karpeles. Their abhorrence of vacuum bespeaks a dread of the void, of death, of the infinite reach of the universe and our infinitesimal size within that reach -- a dread and a defiance. To paint is to begin to fill the void, to assert the somethingness of life against the nothingness of time and space.

Indeed, if Pollock’s conflict was with the void itself, Karpeles’ is within his own response to the void. In his painting, shivering with phenomena small and large and lit up with fiery explosions and rainbows blossoming into multicolored thunderheads, Karpeles manifests his understanding of the void first as an ecstatic celebration of cataclysm -- stormy weather throughout the galaxy. Astronomers tell us our universe is violent, and Karpeles clearly agrees; but he is riveted by the meta-meteorologic fury, and wishes to mesmerize us with its sublime grandeur as well. On the other hand, behind all this gorgeous sturm und drang does lie the final chapter, the impossibly immense realm of absolute zero. Like the blue it lends to our skies, the void lends its blackness -- its heavenly room tone -- to Karpeles’ swirls and surges of incandescent color and clotted, agitated, ignited, and finally liberated form.

This is the argument within Karpeles’ art: Is the void truly empty, or is it full of things and events? And which condition would ultimately be more beautiful? None of us stands to live forever, but do we get to choose which void we’ll leap into? And if so, which will we choose? Robert Frost vacillated between fire and ice; so does Karpeles, presenting us as he does with a universe at once warming and chilling, alluring and daunting, yawning and singing.

Los Angeles
May 2007