Visual artist Iulian COPACEL Follow.Art Card

About me

I’m a visual artist from Iași, Romania, and my practice began not with a brush but with a question: how do we communicate without words? A university thesis on non-verbal communication led me to invent my own alphabet, cut into wood, a private language of marks that would quietly shape everything I made afterward.

That question never left. It moved through THE OBJECT, a series built from interlocking canvases where figures dissolve into a single presence, guided by the gestural energy of Pollock and the figurative precision of Toulouse-Lautrec. It continued through studies of dance and the human body in motion, and arrived, after years of study, at a monumental work where the line itself becomes a kind of handwriting, disciplined and repetitive like an ancient script, searching for meaning through rhythm rather than representation.

Across these bodies of work runs a signature I call the Dance of the Line: density built from repetition, individual marks accumulating into a collective body. It’s less a style than a way of seeing, the same impulse that once produced an invented alphabet now produces paintings, monumental murals, and permanent installations.

My work exists both in galleries and in public space: a monumental permanent installation, OBIECTUL, at Iași International Airport, and large-scale commissioned murals translating the city’s industrial history for corporate and cultural clients. I’m a full member of the Union of Visual Artists of Romania, Iași Branch.

At its core, my practice is a single, sustained argument: that silence, discipline, and line can say what words cannot.