[...] For little money we fly in no time to Rome, Paris or Tokyo. With a click of the mouse we find ourselves, while traveling from one place to another, with a laptop at our finger tips, at the same time in Beijing, as well as in New York. We ‘think’ we’ve been in Rio, in Dakar or Atlanta, but our knowledge is based on television and internet images. Our experiences exist of more or less fictional topographic coordinates, cartographic details, we zoom in and out. [...]

excerpt from text by Ilse van Rijn about paintings by Aquil Copier


After education and working experience as Graphic Designer, Aquil Copier later pursued painting studies at Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where he graduated in 2004. Since then, he has been exploring the subject of 'landscape' with reference to traditional paintings as well as the contemporary image production in the context of mass-media and information technology. This has resulted in large size oil paintings (painted on panels or canvas), where bird view landscapes are portrayed in a manner that intentionally plays between abstract and figurative canons, -thanks to a peculiar painting technique the artist applies. The works comment on the limits of representation and the supposed objectivity and truthfulness of every image, including maps, aerial photographs, navigation software or the world atlas

The full text by Ilse van Rijn is available as PDF file in Dutch or English.