zondag 1 maart 2009

Studio


Statement (part 1)

I started my first paintings of aerial views in 2003 when I was travelling very often by airplane between the south of Europe Italy and Holland. During my flights I was fascinated by the striking differences between the landscape views from my country and Italy. When you are travelling above Italy you see a very different landscape then in the Netherlands: this is of course because Holland is a flat land, and Italy has a great variety of altitudes there are alps, mountains, hills, etc. When you see Italy from above, you do not have the perception of clear structures. You rather see plots of streets and countryside -urban and natural landscapes strangely intermingled.
In short, you see that the Italian landscape is much less designed than the Dutch one: and you start wandering if those differences of views can actually express the different cultural and historical origins of the two countries.


Still what interests me is not a mere representation 1:1 of those impressions related to a political and social history of landscape, or urban planning.
I would say that i use this bird views as a motif, or even better as a trigger. an appearance of the surface of the painting which allows me to catch the attention of the observer and trigger his reaction. A reaction which is at the same time physical and intellectual - which involves his body, his senses as well as his mind. By using an image which is 'likely' to be representing a real landscape, I trigger the attention of the viewer: but when he gets closer, he can realize that what he sees might be very different than what he first had thought. What happens is a literally physical and mental zooming-in and out of the painting and of people belief.


What is at the core of my art is basically the idea that there is an intrinsic ambiguity of whatever representation of reality.
In the process of looking at my paintings which involves the viewer's mind and his senses-body the emphasis is put on the traveling, on the wanderings of the eyes of the viewer along my painting, and on his capacity of reacting with his/her own imagination and beliefs to what he sees.
In short, there is a questioning if that part of the image belongs, or correspond to a REAL concrete object or situation existing in reality.

maandag 26 januari 2009

maandag 24 november 2008

Article (in Dutch) on my work in de Volkskrant, 19 November 2008

"Laag 57" at Gallery De Aanschouw 80b, Rotterdam 14 November 2008





invititation: "I haven't sent you any airmail"

Paintings by Aquil Copier

Reception: Saturday 25 October 16.00-19.00 hrs
Exhibition until November 29 at www.2x2p.com

"For little money we fly in no time to Rome, Paris or Tokyo. With a click of the mouse, we find ourselves, while traveling from one place to another, with a labtop at our finger tips, at the same time in Beijing, as well as in New York. We 'think' we've been in Rio, in Dakar or Atlanta, but our knowledge is based on television and internet images. Our experiences exist more or less fiction topographic coordinates, cartographic details, we zoom in and out."

Excerpt from text by Ilse van Rijn about paintings by Aquil Copier

"I haven't sent you any airmail", Soloexhibition at Gallery 2x2Projects Amsterdam October 2008