VI-XII.1964 Kes Zapkus

Zapkus was born in Lithuania as an American citizen, his family moving to the States in 1947. Strictly abiding by his own pictorial ideas, he asserted the same aesthetic principles in his small pictures as in the ones filling entire wall surfaces, differing considerably in construction and colour effect. He looks upon his paintings as the energetic models of the world: they convey the interdependence of things in which the elements only acquire their meaning in the cross-referential context. He begins work by drawing a gridwork in pencil covered by colour patches and signs in several layers. Their placing and changing intensity lends rhythm and inner pulsation to the surface. Above this layer, he screenprints a pattern of geometrical signs which fix, as it were, the disintegrating picture surface, and sometimes he paints over that layer as well. The final sight is the concentrated synthesis of hand marks and mechanical procedures, balanced tension and energy. Within the almost programmed development of the structure, the spatial fluctuation of the tiny signs, or “information units” inspires the viewer to indulge in a lengthy meditation and examination.

Ferenc Tóth