CATALOGUES

Landscape as a Dream

The landscapes of the third millennium are many, new, and infinite: above all they are undergoing continuous changes. All their reference points are shifted daily, and visual balance and depth are “regularly shattered against appearances and illusions” which are more numerous every day and as quick to appear as to disappear. It is not by chance that we speak about the “urbanised countryside” and, at the same time, about “city spread” in order to indicate somewhere that can no longer be placed, one defined only by its dispersion throughout the area of objects, people, and activities. The most frequent perception of contemporary space is that of an infinite multiplication of visual possibilities and the increasing enlargement of occasions for discovery. Except that with this “excess of seeing” our view is blinded: it loses the depth of the experience, it becomes omnivorous, too fast and distracted to be translated into feelings and meaning.

How then are we to recuperate a visual knowledge that does not seem to be already resolved and overexploited? How can reality and its appearances be cracked open? Perhaps only by superseding them, overcoming them and, then, dusting off myths, Utopias, and fantasies in order to take what is already known back to a state of “distance” (distance understood as nostalgia, deviations, horizon, shadow etc. …). Having lost the dream of a pure, natural world, there is no other alternative than to build new tales on the basis of familiar, “transparent” landscapes. The artists in this show seem to be in search of new narratives and tales because the problem is not any longer one about how to represent reality, but about just which reality to represent: Perhaps it would be better to say the problem is no longer one of reproducing or investigating the outer limits of our experience but the far more radical one of almost re-establishing them, of creating a new visual alphabet, one able to unify our gaze and our vision, inside and outside, both a survey and revelation of places. It is an art that follows a passion for Elsewhere, the aspiration towards an imaginary cosmography.

The world that these artists discover and construct (the natural and cultural landscape) might not be ready and waiting in the Elsewhere, but it is certainly the Elsewhere that helps them to find it.

Like Italo Calvino’s Marco Polo they are forced to journey (and thus observe the nature of things from various points of view) if they actually intend to describe “invisible cities” which, like dreams, “are built on desires and fears”. But what is really meant by the term “Elsewhere”? The Elsewhere is the breaking up of models, of the clichés we are in the habit of using for observing the things that surround us: it is the suggestion of worlds beyond our own limited horizon. A fluidising of spatial constructions and of the forms themselves: a continual transformation. (…)

Luigi Meneghelli