L' ENDSCAPE
We are living in a time when, due to mining and quarrying of natural resources, further urbanisation, industrialisation, pollution, residential expansion and increasing mobility, the 'slow-growth' and 'emergent' landscape is coming under very great pressure. Fertile land is becoming scarce and in danger of being lost. It strongly seems that man, along with the landscape, is in danger of becoming a victim of his own all-consuming and conquering enthusiasm.
These topical questions also move these artists to use the landscape, as a metaphor or starting point, to express these and other concerns or questions. Sometimes this involves treating the landscape from 'romantic-nostalgic' motives, creating a new world or using a newer landscape form as the core of the imagery. Sometimes the landscape is used as a means of expression to depict a zeitgeist and evoke a sense of foreboding or suspicion. It is also a guide throughout the development of an oeuvre to constantly reinvent personal visual language.
The exhibition brings together two artists who use landscape as a very personal given or starting point throughout their oeuvre and create or portray a supreme approach to it. Fascinated by the beauty, melancholy and tragedy of decay and emergence, crumbling and growth, appearance and disappearance, they make interpretations, solidify time. In a certain aesthetic and a bit beside current canons. Images become them, in which many of the contents, meanings and image associations, from sharpness and depth, try to find and show their place.
They are often, not always, feel-good, beautiful, soothing and comforting images.
d.V.D.w.