Landscape is a perspective, a point of view. With each change of era, of scopic regime, there is a change of perspective and a change of landscapes. Not only are time periods indicative of these changes, but so are regions. A landscape is a visual delimitation of geography; therefore, land borders are an indicator of the meaning of the landscape, of the logic of the landscape. Delimiting space implies delimiting time. Both time and space codify the dimensions with which identity is woven. It should not be surprising that the term landscape evokes a sense of belonging.
In Spanish the word used to refer to a landscape shows certain characteristics: paisaje.
Etymologically, “paisaje” refers to the French word pays, which indicates region. For its part, the suffix “aje” indicates action. Paisaje is an act on the environment. Making a país means building identity. To determine a space is to define belonging, which is why exile is an emotionally devastating experience.
In history there are many vestiges about the evolution of the landscape as an act of representation. We could include cave paintings within these attempts. Without a doubt, the geoglyphs are another example of this. Each culture has taken a position regarding space; thus, each culture admits diverse perspectives and consequently generates varied landscapes. In the ancient East, a rich range of samples about the restlessness of the landscape is concentrated. Qin Shi Huang of the Qin Dynasty demolished some walls built by people within the imperial territory. However, he decided to preserve and reinforce the walls that fortified the borders against foreign threats. Thus, around the year 200, before the Christian era, the titanic task of constructing the Great Wall of China was carried out, a geographical and territorial line that combines nature (topography) and culture (empire). Many years later, between 1200 and 1300 AD, Zhao Mengfu, a prince and descendant of the Song dynasty, developed a particular style that gave rise to modern Chinese landscape painting. The distribution of the elements of his landscapes at different heights on the same plane gave a sensation of depth. This gesture will henceforth be known as schematic literality in landscape painting. The autumn colors in the Qiao and Hua Mountains are an exquisite display of the landscape there. French philosopher Regis Debray shares a charming anecdote about Eastern landscape architecture. One day, a certain Chinese emperor asked the court painter to erase a fresco of a waterfall on one of the palace walls, because the noise of the water prevented him from sleeping. After all, who isn’t fascinated by a miniature oriental terrarium landscape inside a crystal ball?
Western cultures have also maintained relationships with the landscape. As a pictorial genre, landscape gradually gained a place in the hierarchy. Barely more appreciated than still life, the landscape rose to achieve autonomy in the 17th century within Dutch painting. Jan Van Goyen, Salomon van Ruysdael and Simón de Vlieger are an exquisite selection in this regard. We cannot exclude from the list some pieces by Rubens and Vermeer’s View of Delft, considered by Proust the most beautiful painting in the world. Probably a high point of the genre is around 1800. The Englishman John Constable and his overwhelming landscapes are a delight. In this regard, it is worth noting that the study of clouds developed by Constable. The sky is regularly part of the elements of the landscape, such inclusion receives the technical name of cloudscape. Constable’s cloud study was based on Luke Howard’s classification, a pillar of meteorology. Howard’s reflections on meteorology, and specifically on the classification of clouds, were an object of fascination for Goethe, who paid tribute to this work in a couple of texts. Goethe’s enthusiasm for Howard’s work even led him to ask Caspar Friedrich for works on the subject. This was the last cornerstone of German Romanticism.
Although contemporary painting recharged by avant-garde isms tried to dilute pictorial genres, the landscape motif remained valid and took on new nuances. Cézanne did not stop insisting on the Sainte-Victoire Mountain. Braque made cubes in L’Estaque, a small fishing village west of Marseille. The dreamscape, emblematic of surrealism, is one of the most recurrent bifurcations within the genre. Perhaps one of the most unique gestures is the accumulation of objects by Kurt Schwitters: Merzbau, a project developed between 1923 and 1943. Just 20 years later, the French artist Arman packed the Parisian gallery Iris Clert as a gesture in response to the emptying of the same gallery at the hands of Yves Klein just two years ago.
But accumulation as a means to generate landscapes was not abandoned; on the contrary, it has become a model to point out both the growth of the urban area and the effects that this entails. At this intersection a large number of artists have ventured into using installation as a medium, whether for variegation or minimalist emptiness. Dolores Martínez de Anda, better known as Lola Álvarez Bravo, thought around 1954 about architecture as a subversive and revolutionary possibility. The overwhelming change of the dizzying modernity that arrived in Mexico prompted him to build an overwhelming chaos constituted by a game of scales, dimensions, perspectives and lighting. The result of this prank was an imaginary, dreamlike, but extremely challenging landscape, perhaps the new Babylon emerged by modernity.
