Land Scapes

By: Heather Jeno
February 2005
Santa Barbara Independent

Armin Mühsam's exhibition, Constructed Landscapes, might just as easily be titled Variations on a Theme, an aesthetic concept that undeniably applies to his process. Mühsam's paintings all show architectural forms in various stages of construction. In the statement accompanying the show, Mühsam describes how the virtual space of his landscape paintings correlates to the actual space of real buildings in the man-made landscape. Mühsam envisions the construction site as an artistic playground where shapes and forms are subject to the manipulative powers of the artist It's a grown-up's version of playing with blocks.

Because ambiguity of time and space plays a key role in Mühsam's paintings, entropy and potential face off in a curious tension. For example, Mühsam's "Sketch of a Landscape" (2003) contrasts a half-finished (or half-erased?) rectangular structure sitting alone in a field with a finished landscape incorporating the same structure. In viewing this diptych, one senses potential in the structure's creation while at the same time realizing its futility. Because neither version appears to be in use, the structure could as easily be in the process of disappearing as in the process of appearing.

Mühsam's variations are most literal in his "Foundation Series" (2002), which includes five paintings that depict the erected ground walls of a single building nestled in a shallow valley. As the artist tries one configuration of the walls, then another, the pictures bring to mind those mathematical equations that can generate an infinite number of patterns. Time stands still in this series of paintings, as shadows marking the sun's angle remain consistent. Yet the series retains a feeling of progression. The technology that was used to build these structures has been twice removed: first by the absence from the pictures of the building mechanisms (e.g. cranes, bulldozers, etc.), and then again by the artists playful reimaginations of the site.

As conventionally beautiful romantic landscapes, these artificial constructions fall short. Mühsam's work is too stark and straightforward to initiate thoughts of Platonic Beauty and Truth. Instead, we see them for what they are: exercises in architectural shape-shifting where form decidedly trumps function.