‘Hell’ (244cm x 119cm) – Acrylic and Oil Pastel on Recycled Plywood.

Hell is a work by COPR* that explores concepts of capitalism, drugs, poverty, modern sexuality, mental illness, and poverty and how these things relate and do not relate by using humour, juxtaposition, relatable symbolism/references, colour, and texture in the Neo-Expressionist style. The work transforms the aggressive emotion and pessimistic outlook of the post-modern life of COPR and the lives around it into a visual essay of the status-quo.

* – ‘COPR’ is the artist alias used by Leonardo Clement to detach his works from his self to explore concepts in art as less of an act of self-indulgence or personal perspective and more likened to the same way a journalist or a scholar researches and carefully considers an idea and presents it in a way relevant to our time, language, and mediums. The word is derived from the abbreviated name of the copyright symbol (©) making the name self-aware of the very thing it does when it is signing a painting, becoming somewhat critical of ownership of intellectual property in the free-market world in of itself.