PAINTING, LANDSCAPE AND TRADITION:

Technology has vastly impacted upon the aesthetic experience of the contemporary urban landscape. In particular, synthetic light has changed the way in which the landscape is perceived and in turn, created a new subject of visual enquiry. While monumental works of architecture maintain their metonymic qualities, contemporary global, economic, architectural and technological conditions are such that urban environs of cities globally are increasingly evolving towards an aesthetic uniformity. For landscape artists, the possibility of a visually homogenous experience becomes problematic. The removal of obvious cultural signifiers dislocates ideas of identity and geographic place, and impoverishes the visual vocabulary of the landscape tradition.

The landscape in art is historically inseparable from cultural representation and interpretation of the sublime. Within the western tradition of landscape painting, the agrarian and the ‘natural’ have often been referenced as major signifiers of cultural identity. In general, these representations are not accurately descriptive of contemporary cultural diversity and, on both a local and global level, ignore the reality of a predominantly urban population.

The function of landscape representation has experienced a perceptual shift and its role has been re-defined through the resurgence of neo romanticisms affirmation of the spectacle and its relationship to the contemporary sublime. The spectacle of the technological vista has imposed itself on the landscape and has displaced nature’s prior dominance in the evocation of the sublime. Verticality and neon command the horizon, and a sense of incomprehensible scale isolates the urban spectator. The same landscape can be experienced twice, first as the architectural and second as the technological. The consequence of this is the emergence of a new landscape imagery which encapsulates the intertextual nature of the urban. Together with its technological homogeneity and cultural ambiguity, the urban has found its place within contemporary visual culture.