HORIZON AND LIMIT

This week I went to the CaixaForum in Barcelona to see the temporary exhibition “Horizon and Limit. Visions of the landscape”, which will be available until September the 1st. The exhibition addresses the concept of landscape and the human impact on nature and I found it very interesting. As soon as the exhibition begins, the introduction text teaches us that the concept of landscape is an invention of art, only five centuries old. This has shaped our perception of nature.

The exhibition in general is highly recommended and has many works of different types for all tastes. I'm going to leave you here the ones that caught my attention the most:

Joan Fontcuberta - Paisaje de la seguridad: billete 200€

Fontcuberta tried to take the fiction of photography to the extreme. Although it seems real, this landscape does not exist. Fontcuberta generated it with a computer program designed to interpret maps. The artist asked the program to interpret the image of a €200 bill instead of asking it to interpret a map. Fontcuberta taught us back in 2002 that to create the illusion of the landscape you only need to play with a code.

Tacita Dean - Fernweh

This work is born from a photogravure created from four small photographs from the 19th century. The artist drew and wrote on top of the photographs. The unreal landscape results from rock formations in the German region known as Saxon Switzerland, while the foreground shows sand dunes and bushes. The artist titled it Fernweh, a German word that describes the desire to travel, escape and disappear from the place where one is.

Michael Najjar - Dow Jones 80-09

Najjar made an expedition to the summit of Aconcagua, the second highest mountain after the Himalayan system. Najjar took photos during the tour, that he digitally manipulated later to match the outline of the mountains with the graph of the world's main stock indices, thus uniting nature with a great representative of humans: capitalism.

I found these works super interesting because at first glance they may look like real landscapes, but they are modified or completely generated by humans. Throughout the exhibition there were different approaches to this idea, so I recommend if you are in Barcelona that you go make a visit, it will definitely give you something to think about.