a search for meaning (some textual fragments)
In a further interplay of transcriptive processes, Rick Copsey uses close-up and amended digital photographs of ridges of paint on canvas to simulate semi-abstract seascapes - the sublime hidden in the mundane. They radiate the unnatural clarity of hallucinogenic CGI ‘stills’.
There is a common fallacy that the mass of the sea quickly becomes a projection for the viewer’s state of mind. It is probably more accurate to consider the dead minutes gazing at the folds and swells of water as analogous to the nullity of hypnotic digital screens; an abnegation of responsibility for physical engagement via the insidiously soporific curl and slap of wave after wave. The seductive surface quality of the medium becomes the actual substance of the work with paint, and therefore painting itself, the clear paternal reference point. By filtering it through digital media and (re)presenting it , the play of the visual becomes the arena under scrutiny. 1.
....combines both painting and digital photography in his work, the initial impetus for making comes from the 'modernist utopian grid' and an interest in materiality, manufacture and textiles. Copsey has used photography to forensically document his painting, and he also employs digital software to generate compositions and has printed these directly onto canvas and also reworked through paint. A referencing to the materiality of painting is tempered by a visuality, yielded through a variety of technical strategies, to create a virtually ambiguous space. 2.
...evoke processes of cutting and pasting from digital media. In conjunction with a confusing variety of technical strategies, his work is both ugly and visually compelling. Blobs of garish painted tartan float among solar systems of planet-like orbs, which incorporate the traces of twisting threads. 3.
Through his practice Copsey attempts to create a synthesis of the visual and the conceptual so as to image the cognitive space/site, for/of painting. To do this, he brings together references to the crudest and most essential foundation of painting - the warp and the weft of canvas - with allusions to the mechanical operations of new technology... 4.
...Rick Copsey mines the geology of canvas thread and modernist grids with an unstable cartography. The paintings are never complete; they never congeal into completeness with their inserts, snippets of other possibilities and the memory of paintings past. The painted exaggeration of a meshing of threads acts as a pointer to the modernist utopian grids and the literal material interweaving of clothing fabric; the raw material of surface-as-display with an unstable armature of paradoxical frames polluted by toxic amoebas... 5.
...Copsey constantly refers to this relationship as an interaction between a reference to the material structure of canvas - the fabric as warp and weft/horizontal and vertical - and of the active process of painting the surface as a process of fabrication. What results is a synthesis of a celebration of pure visuality with a concern for the processes of interpretation. In recent paintings Copsey has introduced a number of cell like forms into the paintings which operate both as pictorial devices and as suggestions of external reference... They then develop an ambiguity based on their potential to be read as medical or genetic imagery while maintaining a deliberate pictorial function as points of attention within a compositional dynamic. The resulting state of ambiguity impacts on the viewing arena where we are continuously shifted from position to position, at times uncertain, but driven by a curiosity and a search for meaning. 6.
The eloquent imageries derived from an intelligent interplay of order and anarchy, rigidity and playfulness, tradition and innovation, alludes to the spirit of the urban place, past and present. At the same time it opens up new possibilities for a visual practice that has been declared dead long ago. 7.
More recent paintings allude to the 'authority' of science and reference diagrammatic and scientific imagery. Rather than endgame statements about the limits of abstract painting, the paintings depict possibilities both within and outside the medium, looking outwards to phenomenal experiences, whilst playfully occupying a space within the tradition of the medium.
...Copsey leaves these works open rather than leaning towards any finished statement or closure... a saturated engagement between the act of looking and the layered object of contemplation. 8.
1. Cordwell, Paul (2010) review - AN Interface
2. Rimmer, John (2008) Digitalis, University of Derby, ISBN 0901437099
3. Smith, Dan Art Monthly October 2003 No 270
4. Dunbar, Tim (2003) essay in Beyond the Endgame: Abstract Painting in Manchester, Manchester City Galleries ISBN 0901673633
5. Cordwell, Paul (2001) from an essay accompaning the exhibition Nought.One% Rick Copsey & John Rimmer, Chapman Gallery, University of Salford,UK.
6. Dunbar, Tim (1999) Departure Lounge (exhibition as part of MART) Trice Publications ISBN 0953191923
7. Mey, Kerstin (1999) from an essay accompaning the exhibition Banal Ground KMZA, Berlin, Germany
8. Ryan, David (1998) Maggie Ayliffe, Rick Copsey, Brendan Fletcher (Arts Council Funded Touring Exhibition) Trice Publications ISBN 0953191907
