Shown in this exhibition are a few of Eldad Koplers new works, all of which were painted during the year 2009. These paintings were bundled together under the title “After the Heat Wave,” and painted during a heavy heat wave in the country. In this combination of words are echoes of another combination of words: “after the flood.” Already here an amalgamation of opposites becomes apparent – the flood and the heat wave. Two possibilities for catastrophe that flow from extreme changes of climate. It seems as if the excessive external reality that characterizes these weird days of haze and heat waves directly influenced Kopler’s intra-psychic experience. Both together find expression in his paintings. Murky skies filled with dust close in over compressed and crowded objects that fill the painted space. The works transmit a heavy feeling of suffocation and claustrophobia. They hint at the troubling climate changes connected to global warming and the destructive influence they have on nature as well as on mankind. A crowded grid of diagonals and irregular perspective intermingle with landscape in Kopler’s paintings. Thus in his works there is an intriguing dialogue between straight lines of a schematic technical/ mechanical nature and organic elements that are rounded and soft (mountains, trees, forests, sky, clouds, sea, smoke…). The tension created by joining these images belonging to contrasting worlds of subject matter, conceptualizes the lack of balance and harmony in the conflict between the natural and the technological. It seems as if they struggle and compete with one another on the canvas as well… In Kopler’s paintings the absence of a human presence stands out. One finds in them instead quite a few robots, machinery and skeletons. Thus the implied presence of man is suggested by referring to him as a future entity (robotic) or alternatively, marking him as an endangered species (in the image of skeletons). Kopler’s painted spaces are reminiscent of alienated spaces resembling vast shopping malls. They do not function as places of entertainment but as laboratories for preserving and classifying signs of life from the past. Unlike the nature of the mall in the story “The Cave” by Jose Saramago, here an entertainment site that swallows you up and offers humans an alternate world of illusion is referred to. But like Saramago, Kopler too describes them as post-modernistic, alienated spaces that abolished human autonomy and authenticity and now operate under their own power in the direction of an uncertain conclusion…”starting from today everything will be no more than a sleight of hand, illusion, absence of meaning, wondering without answers…”
