From Landscape Paiting to the Landscape of Experience

Abstract

The article develops through the successive transformations of the concept of landscape, taking as its basic hypothesis the idea that artistic manifestations are articulated with social transformations, often addressing what is about to disappear. The emergence of landscape painting presupposed both the laicization of society and the consolidation of urban life, thus an effective divorce from landscape space. Similarly, the marks of making, the vestiges of manual labor, were only valued in the art world afterwards, with the impressionism movement that coincides with the mechanical techniques of material production and image reproduction. The increasing emphasis with which modern painting addresses its internal processes of formalization, from impressionism to abstract expressionism, leads to a renunciation of landscape. In the middle of the twentieth century, the exhaustion of a “purist” narrative that values works for the relationship they establish within their specific medium opened a field of artistic action, not defined by isolated means of expression such as painting, sculpture, etc., but by operations between them, where the idea of landscape is again fundamental. The recent resurgence of the landscape seems to carry a sense of resumption of experience.