AQUIL COPIER
Selected work from the series: Appearances can be deceptive, never be the same.
Process
Aquil Copier is a painter who has dedicated his work to research what painting is, and what it does to its viewers. His paintings show a wide spectrum of the many different ways oil paint can be applied and the materiality that appear during or after the process of drying.
The tiny oil paint thread structures, the color changing pigments and the use of mass-tone and half tone color swatches are all materials and techniques that the artist consciously uses to expand the repertoire of what we already know about painting.
In this process, how the viewer physically relates to the work is as well important for Copier. Following French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, the artist believes that indeed we know the world through our experience, for which the body – and all our senses, beside the eye – is central. What happens when the viewer comes close to the painting or when he/she moves along, what color shades or shape emerge or disappear are all elements that are part of the work (what the work does) and on which the artist does not have full control.
Most of his recent paintings are part of an ongoing body of work under the title ‘Appearance can be deceptive, never be the same’. This series refers to the changes that oil paint undergoes since the moment is used on a canvas. The first is the drying process, a chemical process, which is also an aging process that never ever stops. The pigments and binder are interfering with each other since the moment the work is created and sometimes may take a few decades to change. However, this process is inescapable and irreversible. At the same time, the series refers to the changing of colors in the color changing paintings. They will never look the same every time a viewer approaches them, neither from every angle the spectator looks at them.