AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

In the nineteenth century American painting, landscape and costumbrism were the basis for the construction of the national imaginary.

From the time the Europeans discovered the existence of the American continent, it exerted on them an attractive power that was accentuated during Romanticism and included the love of the landscape, local customs and exotic narratives.

Throughout the nineteenth century, America was visually depicted by traveling artists of the old continent who described the wonders of a pristine virgin territory.

Those painters, who had the baggage of European artistic and cultural tradition, painted this land and its inhabitants as subjects of aesthetic value; they admired the grandiose and spectacular wild nature that represented the barren vastness that God had bequeathed to a promising future.

Landscape art served well for taming geography and incorporating the immensity, where new immigrants could be, imagine, dream and highlight universal values, such as the immensity, the eternal, the perennial, the powerfull and the sacred.

The present brings us another less romantic and more folkloric image of America, a landscape where local colors are built around a touristic imaginary that ignores the uniqueness of those who live there, while a new social epic takes place within the natural setting that does not recognize these borders, thousands are diplaced in a changing and new human landscape.

These photographs are representations of the new and changing American landscape, majestic, epic, fantastic and also of its inhabitants. They are places of my imagination where the horizon intersects with reality to make a new imaginary for everybody.

Leonel Luna, 2016
Curator: Cecilia Cavanagh