Landscape, memory and culture
Landscape as a genre painting has had a very particular evolution, which has responded not only to the way the environment changes, but also to the ways in which the artist relates to the environment from a cultural and sensitive perspective.
This relationship has led to the landscape being considered as part of a complex device in which ways of understanding and constructing reality converge based on perception, but above all, on the activation of an intricate symbolic system which leads us to constructions. visuals in which the mimetic reference is only an elemental redoubt that artists generally transcend to propose new visual realities supported by pictorial concepts and metalanguages.
In this order of ideas, the work that Ana Bertina Hursh and Christian Santana Prinz show today confirms the current meaning of the genre, which is not limited to the recreation of the environment, but to the visual and spatial construction emanating from parameters in the that bring together nature, individual and multiple cultural modes.
Assuming the exercise of exploring and experiencing diverse environments, they do not limit themselves to documentation, but rather engage in dialogue among themselves, orchestrating visual and conceptual discourses that are based on the creation derived from working in a woman-man binomial. This aspect, among many others, is undoubtedly one of the most interesting elements in their proposal, since by bringing together two modes of creation, they bet on the game of altering the sense of authorship by opening the semantic field where the interpretation of the landscape is disrupted, giving gives rise to complex interrelationships of plastic, cultural and imaginary procedures based on the experience of spatial and cultural contexts different from one’s own.
The possibility of searching in the unknown for a trigger for the emergence of identity is a resource that has occurred throughout the history of art. Traveling artists seek in strangeness the option of finding challenges of astonishment, but above all, the alternative of activating the identity of both themselves and the spectators.
Ana and Christian have been exploring, walking, living experiences of distant environments, absorbing sensory stimuli and cultural ways of adapting to the environment. In their role as strangers, they have the possibility of perceiving aspects that could be hidden from those in the place, but that emerge before their “naïve” gaze, revealing unprecedented qualities and, consequently, new tools for relating to the material and immaterial context.
From the accumulated experiences they have nourished a collection of memory, which has served to expand their intuitive resources and consequently their creative strategies.
The sense of the landscape genre in his work overflows to open, paradoxically, intimate territories, constant allusions to the individual confronted from his smallness to the magnificence of the natural and the complexity of urban environments, creating symbiosis and integrations that allow us to confirm that the Landscape is no longer that romantic pretension linked to bucolic visions, but rather a complex framework where the image is a trigger and evidence of an adaptive process of the cultural being to its environment.
In the work of Ana and Christian it is confirmed that landscape as a genre in current painting has exceeded its representative capacities to delve into the projection of what is essentially human in an intimate relationship with nature and the environment, thus confirming that there is nothing in around us that is not “touched” by the individual-culture relationship.
JULIO CHAVEZ GUERRERO
CDMX as of September 25, 2018
