Rick Copsey - Paintscapes (2012)
"The Paintscapes series presents photographs of wet paint that seem to circumvent the inherent ‘truth’ of the camera as the apparent verisimilitude of each image renders problematic what constitutes reality.
As illusions, the Paintscapes works mirror Kant’s idea of the sublime in nature as ‘formless and shapeless’ such as the ocean or the sky; as such, they associate the viscous flows of paint with the amorphousness of the sea.
The allusion to the Kantian sublime is a Postmodernist attack on Modernism’s exaltation of pictorial form as finite; instead, the sublime can be infinite as well as formless. As works that manifest the sublime, their condition as a hyperreality presents what appear to be representations of various sea scenes as images without referents where reality and illusion are brought into question.”