Italy is beautiful, or perhaps it was beautiful, because as seen in the cycle of frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti 'The Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government' (preserved in Siena, and datable 1338-1339) for centuries people have dominated nature while giving this action an ethical value. Unfortunately, in the last half-century, this dominion has been very poorly expressed and Italy have badly compromised the good things done in the previous centuries, especially in terms of landscape. Somehow we have worked hard to make this country ugly and Pierpaolo Pasolini was perhaps the most lively cantor of this tragedy. However, Italy remains that formidable historical legacy that generated the Western culture, and a privileged destination as it was for the writers, poets, artists of the Grand Tour. I thought of this when thinking about how I should introduce the upcoming exhibition 'Contemplative Landscapes' by the Belgian visual artist Isabel Devos in Venice. Her contribution competes with that humanistic tradition that still resists here.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti 'The Effects of Good Government in the Country', Siena, 1338-1339

Hendrik Frans van Lint, 'A Landscape with the Nurture of Jupiter', 1737

The exhibition, from its title, brings us back to Romanticism and the prelude of modernity. Let's start with saying that the very idea of ​​the landscape has not always existed. It is outlined with the Renaissance and, as the Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt clarifies in 'The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy' (1860), with the recognition of the inadequacy of the Christian conception of nature. The church opposed the sanctity of nature as a source of pantheism and idolatry. The artists will begin to include glimpses of the landscape as in the 'Madonna of Chancellor Rolin' (1435) by Dutch master Jan Van Eyck, and they will keep doing it until the realism of landscape painting will become established starting from the Dutch seventeenth century.

Jan Van Eyck, 'Madonna of Chancellor Rolin', 1435, Musée du Louvre, Paris

Initially, the fundamental principle still remained that of the imitation of nature, together with the conviction that human art is inferior to the divine one. Somehow it will be only with Romanticism, which enhances the aesthetic value of nature and question the mimetic principle, that art will be freed from this subjection. John Constable (1776-1837) in his cloud studies paints portions of the sky to which the romantic ideology attributes the expression of the moods of nature. It's the poetry of the Sublime, theorized and diffused by Edmund Burke (precursor of the romantic ideology 1729 - 1797), according to which nature, in its power and immensity, imposes itself grandly on man to the point of stunning his senses. The feeling of the Sublime derives from the contemplation of the infinite and from a human aspiration for a dialectic with absolutes, such as emptiness, darkness, absolute light, eternity, power, immensity, and solitude. This transcendental dimension is essential to understand the work of Isabel Devos. To the point that her landscapes are not born of reality but are sublimated and brought to life by small details. The mimesis process is completely irrelevant to the point that beauty is everywhere.

John Constable, 'Clouds', 1922, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

© Isabel Devos, Clouds, 2011, Injekt on Photo-Rag (64 cm x 74cm) American Wallnut Editie 2/5

One of the main protagonists of the poem of the Sublime is another Englishman: Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851). His conception of landscape proposes an overcoming of the realistic datum, pointing to a lyrical and emotional vision, capable of restoring the strength of an emotional impact. Turner's painting technique starts from pouring color on the canvas and later scratch it according to a process that seems to anticipate even the informal. In this desire to work and transform the material we recognize the most recent work by Isabel Devos: "Rock scales". With it, she continues the journey undertaken with the 'Contemplative Landscapes' series, and her desire becomes an alchemical projection in which naturalism win over symbolism. In fact, her work flees from that German idealism that had distinguished the painting of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). Isabel's photography does not have a mystical-religious value, although she retains its character, strength, tension, melancholy, solitude.

William Turner, Sea View, c. mid-1820s, watercolor and gouache on blue paper, Scottish National Gallery

© Isabel Devos, Rehearsal for a landscape II, 2016 Inkjet on Photo-Rag paper (30 cm x 35 cm) American Wallnut Edition 2/5

Isabel Devos, like many abstract and informal painters, feeds on an inner search through colors, sometimes recalling the dramatic palette of William Congdom (1912-1998), or Rothko's color field research (1903-1970). Isabel Devos "paints" nature as a feeling or as a memory of her feeling (as in the work "Rock Scales" which uses the technique of printing Wet Collodion on the glass to generate a dark impression). In so doing she brings her gesture to an extreme synthesis and conveys the concept of infinity into the landscape. The landscape is everywhere. The Belgian artist dismantles the idea of ​​a neoclassical landscape, or to stay in Venice, she does not depict a veduta like Canaletto, an illuminist reproduction, the expression of technical ability. Instead, imagination prevails over observation. The theme of infinity refers by analogy to Giacomo Leopardi's poetics (1798 - 1837), to the homonymous Canto, in whose verses the romantic poetics of nature is condensed: the contrast between the horizon limited by the hedge and the "endless spaces" that the mind can imagine introduces the theme of the evocative power of vision, so frequent in the artistic expression of the romantic age. Thus in the landscapes contemplated by Isabel Devos, the hedges become walls, and the "endless spaces" become the landscapes she sublimated.

© Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1969, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

© Isabel Devos, 'Nuit-sur-mer', (parto of a Diptych) 2015, Inkjet on Photo-Rag paper (58 x 50 cm) American Wallnut Edition 3/5

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Isabel Devos
Urbanautica Belgium