Paintscapes

“Rick Copsey’s Paintscape photo-series looks like photographs of seascapes but they’re really of wet paint drying. Despite his use of distinctly non-traditional picture-making processes, Copsey is a landscape painter who is in the business of enticing make believe and mystification. His thinking might be more in line with Baudrillard’s concepts of hyperreality – “a real without origin or reality” – but he also harks back, as have many contemporary artists recently, to Kant’s “formless and shapeless” sublime. But Copsey’s trick-visions of natural forces at work are less an empathetic depiction of the elements than perhaps a play of illusions for an age where so much experience is digitally mediated.”


The Guardian Guide 15.09.12