Vistas of a Post-Natural World

By: Heather Castro
May 2007
Lexington Herald-Leader

There's a certain quality inherent in a landscape painting that is rarely pointed out in art: the eternal. Trees, rolling hills, a cloud-filled sky – these natural elements go on through time and are basically the same today as they were in the 16th century and as they will be in the 23rd century.

Though it wouldn't appear so at first glance, this eternal quality is a key element in the landscapes by Romania-born artist Armin Mühsam.

Mühsam's oil paint vistas, on view in Replacement Landscapes at MetroLex Gallery in downtown Lexington, offer the viewer a twist on the eternal. His landscapes focus on those that modern man has created: a panorama populated by structures, manufactured by technology and beautiful to the ordered eye.

"Technology (read: Western Man) writes or draws into a landscape just like an artist would draw on a sheet of paper," Mühsam writes in his artist statement.

"Because technology envelops us so thoroughly we accept it as the only possible reality. The more we are enclosed by it, the less we notice that we lose touch with the natural, unmediated world. (The paintings) are man-made replacement landscapes – sterile worlds after the disappearance of the natural."

An example of Mühsam's notion of the replacement of the real is Model of an Industrial Landscape. Here a tabletop model of a group of familiarly flat-colored geometric shapes spew white smoke or steam against a window view of red rooftops hidden among trees and sky.

The model, seated within a blank interior space, is a generic layout of an industrial complex, but the balance of shape and color draws the eye across the painting in an aesthetic appreciation of modern form – an appreciation that does not fully extend to the "real" view of houses beyond.

Though the works are meant as records for future use – landscapes for a world where the outside is lost – they also contain echoes of the past. That is where their strength truly lies.

The painted train tracks in many of the works recall Roman aqueducts, the Great Wall of China and the Nazca Lines of Peru – ancient technology still present in contemporary landscape.

Mühsam's presentation of today's structures, the manner of their use and how they affect our lives provide not merely a vista that replaces what's destroyed but also an eternal mark of our presence and value system.

Strategic Location is more typical of the show in its standard outdoor landscape format. Here, a deserted broadcast tower reaches from its low building to the cloud-filled Midwestern sky.

Undeniably technologically oriented, the tower functions as the visual connector between the earth and sky, intertwining then as nothing else in the picture plane can attempt. It also functions as an expression of humanity's attempted interconnection and dominance of all natural phenomena.

Ultimately, Mühsam's simulacra paintings function as traditional landscape paintings: They are idealized, unpopulated and conceptual vistas of the outside world. In other words, these landscapes, fake views of tomorrow's world, are just as fake as Monet's water lilies of yesteryear.

Rather than presenting pretty images to distract viewers from a turbulent world, Mühsam's vistas present us with a conception of the modern landscape seen outside our time: preserved, maintained, no longer functional but purely aesthetic.

Their significance then lies in their contemporary understanding of that aesthetic, which in Mühsam's case is the shape and focus of the modern environmental experience.