In his large-scale paintings, Kuperman portrays, using a bright palette, dystopian spaces on the canvas, in counter-cultural defiance of restraint, meticulousness, proportionality, and notions of “good taste.” The depictions of wild forests are interspersed with art historical quotes, along with totem poles, tribal sculpture, and abandoned aircraft, marking the decline of civilization and its retreat to a primal state of consciousness. Kuperman proposes a temperament of liberated, non-hierarchical flow that viscerally reproduces visual imagery of sensory experiences—such as drug-induced hallucination or synesthetic perception—and offers alternating transitions between planes of concrete representation (trees surrounded by profuse greenery) and more deceptive and hidden planes (monster heads, skeletons, and human and animal faces). These are revealed to the viewer from within layers of repetitive patterns, amorphous forms and sinuous lines, stimulating the human brain’s tendency to discern familiar patterns within the tangle.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, in parallel with his painting, Kuperman began working in clay. He created a collection of some 25 sculptures he calls “trees.” These sculptures operate—both individually and as a group—within the tension between positive and negative, two- and three-dimensional, and abstract form and implicit concrete imagery. Thus, one can possibly discern within them human heads, grotesque face masks, alluring or menacing severed body parts, monstrous plants or heads of animals that have undergone various and strange mutations and rise, scepter-like, from the ceramic “forest” of trees. All these bring to mind a psychedelic experience, such as that described in Pink Floyd’s song See Emily Play.
Facing the group of clay sculptures is a large sculptural wall installation made entirely of transparent synthetic material in various shades of gray. The forms were derived from the negative shadow projections of the sculptures, then reworked on computer and their surfaces interspliced to be assembled as a new sculptural composition. The installation subverts the inherent physical relationship between a real object and its shadow, presenting a different kind of material presence and absence in space—a new type of relationship between light and darkness, reality and illusion. In this regard, shadows act as a form of antimatter that can cast a new, paradoxical, shadow of its own. The transparent sculpture appears to be a fleeting echo of the material source, subverting its reality in favor of a spell of kaleidoscopic hallucination. The transparent plastic cutouts invite viewers to immerse themselves in contemplation of formal discovery, which may—after a fleeting glimpse of familiar images—once again dissolve, in the blink of an eye, into transparent signs floating in space, as an alternative option of perceiving reality.
Image: Ruven Kuperman, Surfing Turtle and Howling Dog (After Tsukioka Yoshitoshi), 2021, Colored pencils on paper, 100×70 cm
Less Reading...
