We have explored in the previous post inspirations borrowed from nature, and in particular flowers and trees filtered through Artificial Intelligence.
However, nature offers artists a variety of ideas, and some find themselves more fascinated by the immense scale of the natural world. Take, for instance, Laurent Grasso, whose latest exhibition at the Perrotin Gallery in Paris embarks on an exploration of vast landscapes.
We may not be noticing, but we are surrounded by depictions of landscapes: a few of us may be partial to paintings, illustrations or engravings of landscapes, but most of us content themselves with a screensaver on our computers or a smartphone wallpaper showing vast expanses of sea or mountain ranges, landscapes that evoke tranquility and contemplation in the stress and chaos of our everyday lives.
Yet landscapes can also be deceptive as John Berger states in his novel "A Fortunate Man"; for Berger a landscape can indeed obscure reality, concealing truths beneath their picturesque facades.
In Laurent Grasso's "Orchid Island" exhibition (running until December 23) the artist explores the landscape tradition and what it signifies to represent an idealized nature while acknowledging the gradual disappearance of true wilderness.
While the title is a reference to the Taiwanese island of Lanyu – renamed Orchid Island by the Chinese government in the 1940s – Grasso draws from diverse inspirations, ranging from painted landscapes that serve as mementos of a lost paradise to depictions of uncharted territories waiting for exploration and colonization. This exploration led him to the creation of a new series of sculptures, paintings, and a video project.
The video project, shot in Taiwan, captures a lush tropical landscape bordered by dense foliage. Yet, a disconcerting element emerges in this natural scene – a Suprematism-inspired floating rectangular shape hovers above the landscape, casting an air of ominous abstraction. This form hints at high-tech interventions and invokes a sense of mysterious presence, akin to a scenario from a science fiction tale.
If it weren't for this presence, Grasso's work would be more similar to an idyllic 19th century landscape painting; instead, the rectangular shape evokes supernatural phenomena, affecting the landscape and pointing also at the artist's fascination with celestial wonders and the paranormal.
Rendered in black and white, the video also plays with juxtapositions: Orchid Island serves as a tourist destination while simultaneously housing a nuclear-waste dump, leading to conflicts with the Indigenous Tao community. The video also hints at political issues and at the broader tensions between Taiwan and China, implicitly pointing at contemporary aerial surveillance technology as the video was shot using a drone.
Echoing the film, a LiDAR scan shows the ghostly image of a Phalaenopsis orchid in all its fragility: the elusive beauty of this flower, which grows on Orchid Island, embodies the ambivalence of the place.
The paintings in Grasso's new series take instead inspiration from the works of the Hudson River School, a late 19th-century movement that marveled at the grandeur of American landscapes. Grasso's paintings, however, challenge the notion of an idyllic and imagined nature by adding a filter in front of the painting that forms a sort of misty gray veil, suggesting themes related to pollution and smog. Amidst this haze, glimpses of palm trees, mountains, water, and sky endure, evoking the specter of deforestation, climate change, and human destruction.
The haze and the obscured landscapes also convey an air of awe and sublimity, much like the ethereal fog in the "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" by Caspar David Friedrich. There is actually something sublime in "Orchid Island", even though the artist also references as an inspiration the Airborne Toxic Event in Don Delillo's "White Noise", with a dark cloud that is both terrifying and awe-inspiring, at once a threat and an ineffable presence.
The immaterial rectangle and the haze in the paintings morph into four cloud-shaped marble sculptures in the last room of the exhibition. These black marble clouds also hint at the ruyi-cloud pattern and at the symbolism behind it.
Unlike natural clouds, these are not weightless and floating in the sky; instead, they are solid, grounded and heavy. Terrestrial representations, they are materializations of the invisible, enveloped in darkness and ambiguity, serving as a poignant reminder that nature's true essence remains elusive and enigmatic.
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