Quantumscapes: Picturing the Invisible

By Jon Carver

When you stop knowing you begin to know. When you no longer look seeing returns. When you stop striving you achieve. When you live on Earth, you live in a beautiful mystery beyond the wildest imaginings of your highest meta-physicians.

The universe is your hallucination and looking at it, being in it, is an infinite interactive process. Anyone who has ever done life drawings knows this. Life supports infinite investigation, supplies infinite interpretations, and endlessly discloses a complexity composed of the simplest secrets. Every time you look up from your drawing, your writing, to look again at the figure, the objects, the world before you, you see something new. Seeing is the act of discovering the previously unseen. The unavoidable basis of science and art is this fundamentally unstable, literally groundless, foundation upon which all human knowing is built. That’s life.

As a building doesn’t understand but stands atop a foundation, so no academic knowledge can ever grasp the total mystery of the bedrock infinitude of possibility and change. To deepen the acceptance of this truth in yourself and body is the wisdom to recognize the infinite inside and out. This is the heart of creative action and freedom.

So let fall the tower of art babble before the abstract paintings of Paul Shapiro. His vast Quantumscape series neatly resolves categorical issues of abstraction. Like Richter he creates gestural abstractions that paradoxically appear to deny the hand. And, as Richter claims, Shapiro finds his source in nature. Shapiro has arguably (finally) advanced the now-historic cause of abstract painting in a way that hasn’t been seen before. Rather than style he has chosen, like contemporary physicists, (and Aristotle) to turn and face the void. In a sense he might be the only abstract painter since de Kooning or Joan Mitchell to live up to this existential challenge without, like Richter or Motherwell, taking cover in the decorative. Phillip Guston did it, but it drove him back to figuration, back into the same territory where Richter’s and Polke’s best work happens. One is tempted to imagine Shapiro’s work as a Malevich-White Square moment, for the vigor it portends. By returning abstract painting to the small scale of the easel picture Shapiro not only demonstrates his incredible prowess as a pure painter but also distances himself from the stylists of the “if you can’t do it well, do it big” school. Shapiro collapses the landscape into the quantumscape and most remarkably comes to inhabit the interstellar pictorial space of Pollack; all unique complexities intact and with a new and greater lucidity. The “existential void” of post-religious philosophy is not nearly as fearfully indiscernible as first pictured. In fact it supports all magnitude of maps. Shapiro’s prolific output is testament.  Life goes on.

Welcome to the eleven dimensional reality of superstring theory in which a multiplicity of actual and potential universes enfold and unfold within each other across all variety of temporal environs.  That Shapiro has found this Kublai-Yau complexity using the paint-recorded movement of the human hand seems obvious only after the fact. An electron can be in more than two places at once, this quantum reality represents the building blocks of choice and chance, and on an artistic level for Paul Shapiro the quantum world equals limitless possibility. While his “secret technique” collapses the gesture into a rhetorical denial that appears oddly digital, these works are pure paint on paper and panel, simultaneously deeply felt and expressive. His use of collage makes his work both hard and soft edged; it shifts strata. In the same way that Physics is proving that the old wall between science and mysticism is more nothing than something, the paintings of Paul Shapiro cast the old empty existential void as a rich infinitely explicable mystery in which lies a new hope for humanism. Shapiro’s electrons can be equally elegant and expressive at the same time. The work jumps back and forth between purely formal beauty and a sort of visionary pathos depending upon what you want to see when. It is in wonder and intuition that we find our way into the future.

The vast majority of Shapiro’s recent images are outrageously beautiful. Besides remarkable beauty the other thing that makes these paintings part of a great humanist tradition is that they are literally about light. Einstein assures us that at the speed of light time is negligible. For the whirring electron temporality doesn’t really exist. The other fact we forget is that light, besides being timeless, is also invisible. The vaster part of the spectrum is never seen, the infrared and the ultra-violet. They pass through your bones all day long.  What you do see is called color. When you delight in light what you’re enjoying is an invisible energy interacting with certain vibrational frequencies of matter. Black and white in Shapiro’s Quantumscapes correspond then to a kind of invisibility made visible, to light and matter, to weightlessness (lightness) and time as a function of gravity, to the electro and the magnetic, to what Deleuze and Guattari call the white wall and the blackhole. In their analogy, the shaman, the artist, the mystic balances between dualisms. Leonardo found this mystery in chiaroscuro. Shapiro finds that balance, that zero-point, that realm of explosive possibility in imaging the realities proposed by science. Great art, and the great art of living proceeds through synthesis, or the collapse of previously established dualities. In Zen this is the middle way, in spiritual systems it is atonement, in Jungian Psychology it is Synchronicity. In Shapiro’s interpretations of quantum mechanics and other systems of theoretical physics, it is Simultaneity.

The magician’s ability to be in multiple places at the same time is another way to acknowledge the sage’s deep realization that the incredibly complex multiplicity of universes available to be experienced is also, in sum total, the seamless oneness of the cosmos.  There is no beginning and there is no end. Every moment awaits in the one before. Your feet stay on the ground as part of the sum total of cosmic forces. On the atomic level our world of light and matter in time and space is simply a multiplicity of variations in vibration amidst a whole lot of what we call nothing, but which might better be understood as the unseeable, the zero point limit of human perception, or more optimistically, the soon to be previously unseen. The place the future awaits to come from non-being into being. What we call the vacuum, the anti-matter, is most of what our bodies, our everything is. Yet could that curtain be lifted? Let your eyes adjust and look again…