A landscape that is no longer a Neo-Romantic refuge, a superficial caress or a new voyeurism, although exhausted and barely analytic.
It is not a “reactionary” landscape: reactionary is the other face of the avant-garde, but these are hard times and sleepless nights for the avant-garde, whose epochal cycle has come to an end, even though some may attempt an umpteenth pretense, or reduce everything to a persuasiveness, a multitude of colors, a playful glitter, a technological aestheticism without the “essence” of the technical. Perhaps now the “sublime” is the impossible and the landscape is “impossible”.
After the last remnants of nature, the last chance, can I still be so “sure” in understanding that I will lose. Can I go “beyond nature”?
The landscape is useful in terms of its owns cancellation. It does not want to relate to society, even though the signals of communication are imposed upon it at times.
The landscape repudiates indifference and glitter, burdened as it is with its own disappearance. However the landscape is still a place of signs where sense and concept are mediated. It is the absence of a landscape that fills and reveals the landscape, living its drama of loss.
Seen by everyone, consumed by everyone, can the landscape escape its fate? Can we paint its desperate obscurity ?
Can a landscape that is a possibly unsettling commentary, in that it is already unsettling, today paint a landscape? But of you “Impossible landscapes” I ask only questions that will help me carry on after the loss.
I do not know these landscapes, even though I have seen panting Licinian breasts from the studio in Numana, Italy. No, they are not memories, perhaps just missed opportunities, uninhabited dwellings, because they were only described. I have no idea how to live in this barn where things return, where ghosts re-encounter signs that they themselves had abandoned. No return, just a rapid transit where the image, at times, is pierced by its own transparency. A landscape beyond the confines, like a place to be crossed with the silence of the image.
“… Feeling oneself to be nothing more than a passer-by on Earth, not a traveler heading to a final destination.”
Perhaps Nietzsche is still right.
Concetto Pozzati 1991