Brief Essay on Landscape in Argentine Visual Arts

Adventures and misadventures about the landscape

In the course of history, the Visual Arts have dynamically engaged with nature and the environment. The landscape did not emerge in art history as a pure genre in itself. Even the impressionists, quintessential landscape painters, frequently used it as a foundation for a different genre.

The landscape gained a more autonomous significance in the 16th century. Gradually, it came to serve as a means to validate the artist's virtuosity. Its development from the Middle Ages is part of a cycle in which humanity sought to establish harmony with the world. Gombrich recognizes the landscape as "a pictorial institution that has allowed the development of invention and novelty, particularly in the codification of planes and the use of a perspective system." The emancipation of the landscape as a genre preceded that of the historical monument. The expansion of geography and the conquests of the "New World" helped consolidate both the fantastic landscape and the landscape of facts, bridging art with science.

The romantic idealization of the landscape in the 18th century remained within the bounds of the possible and imaginable. In "Du Paysage," Baudelaire distinguishes various categories among landscape artists: colorists, draftsmen, imaginative artists, etc., showing a greater interest in a category, the fantastic, which he describes as follows: "Each of us carries our own ideal of landscape within us." The gaze upon the landscape is a cultural fact of modernity, where everything becomes constructed in language. The avant-gardes will reflect on the mechanized nature, and within figurations, the gaze of the post-impressionists was crucial. Cubism geometrizes nature and integrates man into the environment with the same textures. Surrealism restores the landscape with symbols and adds temporal reflection to space. Informalism and pop incorporate other landscapes, alternating natural data with symbols.

In Argentine painting, the genre came to life with trends in the first half of the century. Natural landscapes and urban landscapes traverse geographies and imaginaries of our culture. The first decades (Sívori, Fader, Quinquela Martín) affirm both the projection of subjectivity onto the environment within the framework of post-naturalist tradition and the social landscape, the working environment, and the other social classes that participate in Argentina. In the second half of the century, neo-figuration, particularly Noé, discovers the landscape with a vibrant palette. And so it arrives at contemporaneity with Mondongo with this work recently exhibited at the MAR Museum and previously at MAMBA in 2013. They manage to innovate once again in their forms of representation, in their ways of creating, and double down, not only playing with the genre and foundational art issues but also entering the terrain of landscape representations with different materialities.

The only certainty that has emerged regarding this genre is that variety is a fundamental aesthetic principle in a landscape.