LA CIENEGA AREA

There exists in physics a theory called the Anthropic Principle that is based on the idea that because we are here, the world must have been designed for us. Work by New York artist Peter Drake suggests a grim twist on this premise; his paintings depict a dark and inhospitable universe where all light has fled the heavens and man stumbles blindly into the future, driven by a strange riddle with no solution. If this is the world designed for us, we must’ve done something very bad indeed.

Drake cites Italian painting of the 15th Century as his central influence and he occasionally succeeds in imbuing his work with the epic grandeur characteristic of Old Master masterworks. Livestock--horses and cats in particular--turn up frequently and the Old Testament is sometimes invoked; in “Going” a nude man and woman at a fork in the road head off in opposite directions and we’re left thinking of Adam and Eve. Working primarily in sanded black-and-white ink on paper, Drake has a highly romantic sense of color and the palette he employs when working in oil leans heavily on the deep ebony black and fiery burnt sienna typical of Renaissance painting.

More often, however, his work puts one in mind of Swiss painter Henry Fuseli or American visionary artist Elihu Vedder. There’s a nightmarish, hallucinatory quality about these paintings possibly attributable to the fact that Drake’s figures have the unhealthy look of bodies exhumed from the grave. Emaciated, charred, immobilized by the exhausting weight of time and space, they exist as in a dream, mute and powerless.

Often appearing to be drowning or on the verge of being engulfed by undulating waves of ground or sea, his figures lack any sense of individuality; what we repeatedly see instead is the same Kafkaesque Everyman struggling through the long, cold night. In his first solo L.A. show, this young artist makes an impressively mature showing; Drake is a skillful technician, knows his art history and has a highly dramatic and personal point of view. (Michael Kohn Gallery, 313 N. Robertson Blvd., to March 15.)