The Coming Community

Elad Kopler

Elad Kopler's paintings feature urban landscapes that appear to have been seriously damaged or partially destroyed. The desolate, vertical and horizontal outlines of buildings assimilated into vestiges of nature point to the former existence of a lost culture. Various architectural forms - such as a geodesic dome reminiscent of an ecological structure, or a series of concrete pools - inhabit the same rocky, empty landscape; the mountaintop on the horizon is marked by the memory of a structure - a temple or an observatory. These compositions, which cannot be encompassed at a single glance, allude to the history of landscape painting. Yet whereas in Romantic painting the sublime is associated with a sense of awe, in these images its presence provokes instead a sense of anxiety. The fictional expanse created by Kopler appears to include the figure of a gatherer, who has taken upon himself to preserve the vestiges of a lost culture. These paintings allude to the possibility that following its destruction, the vestiges of our culture will become exotic archeological artifacts to be studied by future, unknown cultures.  

Born in Israel, 1974; lives and works in Ramat Gan