Back To Landscape
As part of the 1st International Festival Of Short Movies About Painting Arts "Erarta MOTION PICTURES"
Saturday, March 30 2013, 20h
Erarta Museum
Line 29th, 2 Vasilyevsky island, Saint-Petersburg 199106, Russia
Curated by Xavier G.Puerto
After the appearance of Giorgione’s “La Tempesta” in 1506, the importance of landscape grew. It occupied the centre of compositions and became a key topic of consideration for the history of painting in recent centuries, reaching its pinnacle with the German proto-Romantic movement “Sturm und Drang” and the British painters of the 19th Century.
But this huge popularity prompted a use and abuse of the topic, and tastes changed with the arrival of the Novecento (20th.). The new art of the century, cinematography, made its final bet on fiction, setting landscape to a decorative function. When painting, its original and main field of action, underwent the rise of abstraction, it seemed the last nail in the coffin for what was now considered a kitsch topic. While some masters of cinema tried to place landscape at the centre of discussion their championing wasn’t enough for a seventh art which focused its attention on new techniques.
Right at the turn of the second millennium, with a wide development of different techniques and methods in filmmaking, stunning new special effects technologies, and the possibility of creating worlds from nowhere, artists have paradoxically decided to return to an ancient means of expressing themselves - not as the topic of their works in an intellectual manner but in transforming, manipulating, and retouching nature with new tools, taking the landscape as a concept for demonstrating all their capacities, and providing a new interpretation of a historic issue.
Take a seat, a program of more than an hour will bring us in a soft and rough trip. “Back to Landscape”, through different pieces, sees filmmakers employing unusual lenses, coordinated choreographies, barely real environments or new perspectives, considering whether landscape or cityscape a free field for experimentation and a testing place for new techniques and formal innovation.
