The vastness of an expanse functions as the dominant dimension of a landscape thanks to its uncontestable and omnipresent reality, the security of knowing that there is always something more out there, beyond the picture frame, on the other side. Something we know is there even if we cannot see it: limitlessness. Like vastness, there are also diversity, fleetingness and impermanence, some of the features defining identity in landscapes which challenge the sensitivity of experience.
This is something which Robert Cahen’s visual essay in Paisatges (2018) attempts to convey, as part of a video-installation where the tension between a (fixed) image and its transitory nature undermines all certainty.
The problem of space, something continuous, infinite and unavoidable, imposes itself on artists of all latitudes, who tackle it as much to underscore it in affirmative terms so as to reinvent it conceptually, as to intervene it in some way, seeking a diverse range of esthetic and political interpretations and effects.
Because this is about the register of space and its violation, something that persistently intrudes as an image of reference to be either affirmed or denied, vindicated, parodied or intervened. But what it cannot be is neutralized, as it condenses an entire spectrum of experiences and beliefs, from utopian dogma to political tenets, from visual records to conceptual designs.
Infinity is made up of a selection of videos about landscape which belong to the collection held by the Es Baluard Museo de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo of Palma de Mallorca, orchestrated by its director Nekane Aramburu.
