A drive through an old Dutch landscape and a look back into the painted history of it.

The rear-view mirror with its tinted glass and slight curvature, could be considered as a modern Claude glass, a small black convex mirror used by painters while the reflection gave a landscape a picturesque aesthetic. The user would turn their back on the scene to observe the framed view through the tinted mirror in a sort of pre-photographic lens. The aesthetic of the picturesque trained people to look at landscapes as if they were landscape paintings.

This triggered me when I started photographing the old cultural landscape of Twente for an assignment to develope an artwork for a multi story car park and discovered in the local museum how many parallels could be found between my photographs and some landscape paintings. The landscape of Twente was a favorite motif for many painters from Ruysdael to Mondrian. I discovered, that a number of paintings turned out to have been made in almost the same locations as my photos. For instance Mondrian painted the landscape near Oele, where I had taken photos of silhouettes of coniferous trees.

236-223-165 x 73 cm

2011