Elad Kopler: 7 Paintings catalog

The Press of History: On Elad Kopler’s Works

Hadas Maor

When I encountered Elad Kopler’s current cluster of works during a preliminary studio visit, some were spread out on the floor, and some were hanging directly on the walls of the space, without any rear frame, support, or stretcher. The looseness of the canvas thus exposed allowed the intense materiality of the painterly act to erupt, making the tension between the absence of an outer frame and the multiplicity of inner frames in the works the decisive element in contemplating them.

Alongside the direct application of paint, Kopler also used an imprinting technique by painting on papers of different sizes, soaking them in paint, and using a roller to transfer the paint and embed it into the works. Due to the imprinting act, these parts of the works are a negative drawing rather than a positive painting, and the distinction between the various layers of the paintings is blurred. Moreover, through the use of imprinting, Kopler created the internal geometric division which lends the works qualities of aerial photography or a map, referring to territorial as well as ornamental aspects.

The cluster includes large, colorful works, stormy and at the same time orderly, presenting an assortment of refracted gazes, reflections, and forms, subjected to what appears to be an ongoing struggle between dispersal and convergence. The relinquishment of the painting’s frame, of the full stretching of the canvas, during the work process, is what generated the multiple inner demarcations and the engagement with the tension between abstraction and regulation. The act of painting itself involved the use of a wide variety of materials, including oil, acrylic and spray paints, oil pastels, markers, etc., and the materials’ non-hierarchical application on a bare, unprimed canvas is what enabled this seemingly impossible combination.

The papers themselves function as a kind of private diary, in which the history of painting is contained and recorded. Each paper evokes a different context from the history of art, from the figurative to the abstract, from the historical to the contemporary, from the lush and abundant to the frugal and minimalistic; a melting pot of themes, colors, and practices, that seems to be flattened and smoothed into a single compressed whole.

Internal frames have appeared in Kopler’s work in the past, but in this group of works they take on a different meaning. In earlier works the architectural context of the imprinted frames was intense and direct: windows, doors, scaffolding, bars, etc., but the continuous attempt to deliver the description of the space from the boundaries of logic seems to culminate in the current body of work, where the descriptive aspect of the three-dimensional space seems to have been pressed.

multiplied, been broken up and have diversified. There are spaces today of every kind and every size, for every use and every function. To live is to pass from one space to another, while doing your very best not to bump yourself.” 1 Kopler’s works indeed present a multiplicity of spaces, but these invade each other beyond recognition, and the struggle to produce clear boundaries and distinctions between them seems a priori doomed to failure.

The various frames in the works may be construed as a repeated engagement with the window in art, from the window facing outwards to the world as a metaphor for interior-exterior relations, to the window as a principled frame, which allows for flattening or abstraction of the world. At the same time they can also be regarded as evidence of the implosion of different worlds into the act of painting; periods, gestures, and ideas, swallowed up as into a black hole where the energy is so dense that it jumbles and erodes everything in its vicinity.

In his book Species of Spaces, George Perec maintained that there is no longer one space, but only multiple small bits of space: “Spaces have

1 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans.: John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1997 [1974]), p. 6.

Elad Kopler Chess in Spring, 2021 Oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvas 176 x 137