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Editorial Rosa Olivares
The creation of landscape as an artistic concept is, without doubt, the responsibility of painting. Painting made nature a subject, landscape a genre. A genre which crosses the history of culture, both western and eastern. Landscape was created, reproduced, invented and altered by the most famous painters' studios of each period. Nature reflected dramatic, magical and religious aspects but rarely was a landscape painted as it really was, in fact, the vast majority of the most famous landscapes in the history of painting never existed as such. Painting was first based on memory, then on sketches, and eventually the pleinairists set up their easels in the countryside and began to paint what they actually saw.... and photography was soon to replace them. In fact, it was with photography that the landscape which art offered us became genuine and provable, at least for a time. Painting was to invent an ideal landscape, false, full of different focuses and places, caves and vegetation which never existed, mixing on the canvas elements of memory and desire, of dreams and social needs. The concept of 'picturesque landscape' was being created: A landscape so beautiful that it appeared to be painted, in other words, it was false, a lie. Nevertheless, this idealisation, this conceptual and artistic creation, has become a historical reference point, and what is more, a model for the creation of parks and gardens and for the construction of a culture which is most probably as false as those landscapes which always appeared to us to be so real.
But little by little that landscape has changed. Both the countryside and cities have altered with the political, economic and social development of the population. The arrival of photography and its use as an artistic and professional language has served, among other things, to definitively change the idea of the genre of landscape. If in classical painting the genre timidly, scarcely reflects the creation and development of the city, photography, on the other hand, claims for itself that changing and different model. Colour, the traditional canon of beauty, will thus be altered by the arrival of a great variety of aesthetic concepts, in which the resurgence of architecture will be a key element. Black and white and greys, light and shadow, the idea of landscape as a line of buildings….Today it is photography which is evolving and exploring a genre which is now an idea: landscape. And although rough, wild nature, solitary and excessive, silent and subtle, continues to occupy the minds and objectives of many artists of today, it is without doubt architecture and cities, buildings and streets, vulgar or special, empty or crowded in all sorts of ways, which represents the novel and characteristic landscape of our time and of the photographic language. Films have been the grand showcase for fictitious architecture, for crowded, encapsulated urban edifices floating in the air, for impossible cities and buildings - impossible? The future always seems to us to be impossible and the advances of this future, in isolated images, simple notes of what is to come, appear to us to be games, illusions, artistic approaches divorced from reality. Architecture on paper, the architect's plan, lends itself to this illusion as does photography and painting, as does all plastic creation. And in this case, a certain discomfort with urban reality adds to ever more overflowing imaginations and overwhelming technological advances. Architecture is already in itself a sub-genre of photography, from the excellent professionals who devote themselves to photographing buildings under construction, working at the same pace as the architect builds, reflecting the process of raising these new pyramids, the contemporary symbols of power and culture, to those who travel all over the world making an improbable catalogue of streets and alleys in Tokyo, Genoa, Beirut, Barcelona, New York.... industrial cities, markets, landscapes of wealth and poverty, misery and war and transformation. Portraits of the world today. But, just as the classical painter began to imitate nature in order to enter immediately into a creative process which would lead to the transformation of reality into something else, into an ideal landscape, impossible, romantic or tragic, kitsch or symbolic, in the same way photographers today, real artists with nothing to envy the classical painters, create and recreate, transform the landscape of their time. Just as the artists of other periods reflected the spirit of the time in their landscapes, as in portraits or still-lifes, contemporary photographers now transfer onto emulsified or digitised paper the fears, phobias, anxiety and beauty of our period, making architecture the symbolic exponent of a historic moment. The dialogue between architecture and the other fine arts has always been lively, constantly replenishing itself. Architects today, the great stars of architecture, are real artists, creators of inhabitable forms and concepts which are altering our reality, adapting to changing circumstances but also changing the image of the cities and buildings, constructing symbolic works, paradigms of our time. But many of these buildings, which mark the history of modern and contemporary architecture, seem impossible. They are taken from the world of imagination and dreams; they are radical works which, on paper appear to be lies; they are paper constructions which photography immortalises and which take us from distant cities to countries never visited. They are fictitious architectures which have become reality and which are reality because someone, many people, have photographed them and that paper, that image on paper, makes them not only real but indisputable and immortal, surviving conflagrations of all types.
There are other landscapes, other architectures, other buildings which also exist on paper but which are absolutely fictitious. Creations of contemporary artists, of photographers who transfer to their creations the mixture of dreams, obsessions, idealisations and fears with which the old painters created the landscapes we admire today in museums all over the world. Films like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Tim Burton's Batman, show us inhabited cities; non-existent places, buildings which have served as models and which in turn have been taken over by a certain reality. The reconstruction and recreation of a landscape of today and of a rapidly approaching tomorrow, perhaps of never; landscapes of an uncertain place located between our memory and our imagination, a landscape resembling that of dreams and nightmares. These images of non-existent buildings sometimes have their roots in the most authentic reality. Other times they stem from the artist's imagination, his computer, his studio, his laboratory, his mind. They come from the creation of scale models and surroundings which are photographed, making us see them as absolutely real (Oliver Boberg), when they are actually small reconstructions or enigmatic atmospheres (James Casebere), close to the world of films, rooms made of skin (Aziz + Cucher), buildings which no longer exist but which were painted before disappearing, operated on, recreated and photographed, converted into different place, different things (Georges Rousse), mysterious buildings converted by the art of computing magic into spaceships (Mario Milizia), almost real overcrowding (César Domela and Giacomo Costa) or empty cities, with closed windows and without advertisements or signs of life (Mario de Ayguavives)… Fictitious architectures which also alter the idea of landscape and cities, which pose a perverse dialogue with architectural reality, which practise a criticism which is not only aesthetic but social, broadening ideas and developing concepts, complaints and fears of the city dweller who dreams of impossible houses in cities which do not exist and who lives, as we live, in paper houses and cities of smoke and light.
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