Book Description

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to announce a group exhibition curated by Matthieu Poirier. The exhibition will bring together works by twenty artists of eight different nationalities to explore the notion of landscape. Landscope, the exhibition and book, intend to call into question the art historical precedent of the correlation between landscape and drawing. The exhibition thus assembles, in two successive shows (Paris and Salzburg), over one hundred works, often in atypical formats, by artists for whom drawing is often just one medium among others, and landscape, a non-exclusive genre. Under the neologistic title "Landscope" - a contraction of "landscape" and "scope" [from the Greek skopein "to behold, to observe"], landscape is regarded as both a site and a view. The landscapes brought together here are often natural, yet reject conventional narrative or narcissistic themes. As in the mirror-like illustrations of Maeterlinck's dream of a theatre without actors, these scenes systematically exclude all human presence and thus contribute to the establishment of a scenography of absence, of a paradoxical phenomenology of emptiness. Even if these landscapes are completely deserted, they nevertheless remain "event-scenes [paysages d'évènements]" (Paul Virilio), genuine locations, resulting most frequently, from the collision of formal, logical and scopic motivations, rather than as a result of a narrative. Chosen here for its manifest artificiality and its necessarily dialectic relationship with the world, drawing appears as the indispensable tool for reconsidering this notion of landscape as well as the related themes of perspective, space and representation. It is not so much the spatial landscapes that are observed here, but through their archetypal characteristics, the very notion of landscape itself.--Press release.