VICTOR KERPEL: The More Things Change

By Russell Drumm

A bloated, catapulted pig free-falls toward the battlements of a high-walled fortress. Muslim defenders pour boiling oil onto attacking crusaders below. Arrows fly.

That surrealistic image can be found in Victor Kerpel's painting "Desecration of the House." It is based in fact. Well aware of their enemy's abhorrence of anything porcine, those attempting to take Jerusalem back from the forces of Islam during the second and third Crusades of the 11th and 12th centuries would slaughter a big hog, let it rot in the sun, then launch it onto their enemies.

Mr. Kerpel, who lives in East Hampton, surfs in Montauk, and paints in New York City, said he found himself wiped out after completing a series of seven canvases, which, in form and content, acknowledge the fact that not a whole lot has changed in the Middle East in a thousand years.

In "An Ancient Land by the River," armored crusaders on horseback wearing the red cross of St. George negotiate with mounted Arab fighters during what looks to be a lull in the battle. Jet fighters swoop low on the distant horizon.

In the lower left of "Deus Lo Volt" ("God wills it"), the crest on a fallen shield with an arrow embedded in it depicts the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

There's a horse pierced by a spear, as in Pablo Picasso's "Guernica." "Pablo got it from Goya, and Goya got it from Leonardo's drawings," said Mr. Kerpel. The canvases show classic battle scenes reminiscent of those painted during and after every war in history - and that's the point.

"I'm not blaming anyone. I'm apolitical, or was until recently, but it's just an aspect of the human condition. People always invoke their deity. 'God wills it,' is the battle cry on both sides. Maybe it's embedded in the genes. That idea is what the paintings are about, a cerebral thing delivered in a visceral fashion."

The series was begun before the Iraq war, and the painter researched it by reading all he could on the Crusades. When the war broke out, "I said, it sounds like what I've been reading about."

Mr. Kerpel said the idea for the series came to him "partially because of 9/11, but also the fundamentalism, which is not going to go away in my lifetime, and makes for a spooky future. Resources hemorrhaged, ill will: the earmarks of the Crusades," Mr. Kerpel said.

His references to classical painting - "flat perspective, but with knowledge of full perspective," and a surface that looks like varnished egg tempera - give the paintings a multidimensional quality that avoids the literal and "alludes to the continuance" - his idea that the crusades never seem to end.

Mr. Kerpel said that he paints with "organic materials, the old-fashioned way" - that is, in oil on linen. "These paintings are radical - they're painted," he said, taking a swipe at unconventional ways of making art. Mr. Kerpel is mostly self-educated.

"When I didn't go to school, my dad dropped me at the Met," he said. "Some of the best paintings in the world are in New York City. I studied at the knee of masters. It was my way of rebelling against modernism." Abstract painting, he said, is "like juggling with one ball."

He enrolled at the School of Visual Arts on a full scholarship, but left after a year, put off by the school's predisposition to minimal and conceptual art. "My instructors were into color field and said drawing and painting were dead."

"I had to go through this Odyssean journey myself," he said. Mr. Kerpel taught himself anatomy and perspective and the other basics of drawing and painting. As a result, he said that he found himself on the outside of the New York art scene, and continues to feel an occasional spasm of regret over "fighting with my instructors" instead of trying to make useful friends.

And so it was that when the largest of his crusade paintings, "Death to the Living, Long Live the Killers," won the prestigious Clark Award at the National Academy of Design in New York in June, "I almost soiled my pants."

"The paintings are hard to swallow for some. I didn't think they'd go for this," he said. "Plus, in times of duress, people might want smiley faces. It took someone with courage," he said of the judge that gave him the award. "I never saw it coming."

Collectors have bought two of the paintings in the new series. One of the remaining five canvases is a self- portrait of a resigned-looking painter in a black chain mail shirt holding a helmet and gloves.

"I'm thinking of doing paintings about dance. Romeo and Juliet." Mr. Kerpel said.