JAKUPSIL

Visually akin to children's drawings, Handler's paintings exude freedom, innocence, and primitiveness, making them hallmark features of his work. These painterly scenes he creates manifest his guileless and intuitive voice, effectively supplanting the inherent anxieties and losses rooted in personal stories with cheerful energy.

For over thirteen years, he has consistently portrayed endearing ghosts, sportive girls, and various flora and fauna. Initially conveyed through monochromatic drawings with a dismal undertone, these characters served as a way for him to intimately represent and find solace in the inevitable losses he once experienced. His narrative subsequently unveiled a fantastical world, where allies such as bats, snakes, foxes, or fish, coexist or engage in battles amid UFOs in cosmos-like backgrounds adorned with flowers or stars. In this fashion, he delves into fleeting moments in life, counterbalancing fear with joyous instances and translating his emotions, rooted in the love of cherished ones and personal memories, into vivid canvases. Beneath the fairytale-like images lies his admiration and reflection on existential life. His work, blending fine art forms with popular culture references, establishes a distinctive formal language in which his defined characters and painterly strokes harmonize. Such a stylistic approach can also be observed within the framework of today's neo-pop art.

Handler's paintings often abound with humorously exaggerated characters: flying UFOs, blushing ghosts, girl figures, and various animals, all depicted in simple, reduced forms. These characters seamlessly blend with their background, a tendency more pronounced in his recent works with thicker textures, simple curves, and vibrant colors. Text elements such as "Make Me Blush" or "Hug Tight" impart a comic strip quality, often echoing narratives found in superhero or science fiction genres with UFOs, abductions, and battle scenes. He employs acrylic, oil sticks, and spray paint to intuitively follow his body movement, turning the painting process into a more physical dance-like ritual. Oil sticks hold particular allure for him as they enhance a uniquely raw and direct sense that arises from interaction with the canvas, allowing for a more unbridled and unpolished mode of expression.

Epics often follow the archetypal structure of myths, where heroes venture from the ordinary to conquer challenges and achieve victory. His recent battle series such as Toki Girl in Battle depicts a struggle against adversaries – be it evil, demise, despotism, or idolatry – symbolized by UFOs. This portrays a lion’s will to attain freedom, breaking away from the docile spirit of a camel, as depicted in Nietzsche’s Metamorphosis. Joyful childlike figures against a blooming background, as seen in Finding Our Spot and other recent works, reinforce this idea. According to Nietzsche, the final transformation of the human spirit is represented by the child, symbolizing creative freedom and transcendent vitality, reached after transitioning through the stages of camel and lion. In essence, the child sublimates life into a form of play, a work of art. Keith Haring believed that infancy embodies the purest human experience, while Picasso dedicated his life to painting like a child. 

The girl figures embody a new dawn, playfulness, and creative force. They also serve as expressions of beloved ones that allow the artist and the viewers to overcome vanity and mortality. In each of us resides the inner child. By embracing his inner child, Handler's artistic expressions have been made possible. The girl and ghost characters, often used in his art, could act as bridges connecting our everyday lives to eternity. Through the dual nature of darkness and cuteness, his work is remarkable in how they projects the forgotten child into adults and approaches us as a symbolic figure that reveals the hidden fears and defiance within our inner selves and finite lives.