Landscapes Talks : What it reveals and hides

Questioning landscape in the digital age means going back to basics: questioning the relationship between artistic creation and the representation of reality, and the place of man as spectator in the Romantic tradition, how can we consider landscape as an artistic theme today? What does it show, what does it hide, and how does the cultural symbolism of places reflect our longing for elsewhere, our childhood fears, our need for solitude and our thirst for freedom to reclaim battered territories?

Between the phenomena of overpopulation, deserts and a return to lives far from galloping urbanity, what does this relationship with the landscape say about our desires, our dreamed-of lives, between the ideal and disenchantment? 

Jean-Paul Agosti explores Colette's landscapes around Saint-Sauveur en Puisaye, the forests and marshes that the writer of Le Blé en herbe loved to evoke.

Amélie Chassary's majestic forest is adorned with the addition of paint to reveal even more density.

Soo Kyoung Lee evokes the weightlessness of the landscape in an abstract work that appears like a dreamlike image escaping reality while retaining its cultural references. Kahina Loumi seeks out the essence of a landscape by reducing it to planes, horizon lines and flat areas of color, evoking the South between coastline and infinity.

Alice Magne's collection of dye plants in the landscape is reminiscent of the primitive practice of using natural elements to create pigments, inducing this notion of collection, this time of exploration by the artist in the landscape that allows contemplation to leave its mark on the canvas. 

Beck Marshall explored a protected, hard-to-reach Corsican forest under the glow of a full moon. The aura that emerges tends towards the mystical. 

Eleonora Strano's series on the landscape of eastern France shows how bodies come back to life years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Beneath the appearance of leisure images lies the idea of man's reappropriation of the land.

Curated by Annabelle AUDREN, director 46 St Paul Gallery.