Nature Is Art’s Subject

Djozer Mastaba at Saqqara compound, Egypt, 2667 - 2648 b.C. Photo: Mstylav Cherbov, 2008

I have spent so many years studying landscape painting that I cannot even remember how I started. I am an intellectually curious person. Many different subjects pique my interest, and seeing that the field of art is fertile for everything, I have often strayed from the research I developed at the time of my PhD. But today, as my book goes to press, (privileged) people are locked at home, and nature does not stop manifesting against two hundred years of disastrous actions, it seems to me that it is time to reflect deeply upon the relationship between art and nature.

            Humanity has peopled the earth for hundreds of thousands of years. Much of what we know about the first social groups was conveyed to us through art. Through material traces such as artifacts, engravings, and drawings, we got to know migratory movements and the elements that were part of these peoples’ lives almost a hundred thousand years ago. Life is short, art is long, as the old Seneca used to say.

“Spider", a popular figure among the Nazca Lines at Sechura Desert, Southern Peru, 500 b. C .- 500 a. D. Photo: Diego Delso, 2015

            The first great human interventions in nature are artistic. Some of them still subsist, such as the Egyptian mastabas and the Nazca lines in Peru, and to this day they foster speculation regarding the meaning of life and the world experiences of those who created them.

            The idea of this workshop is to propose reflections on the role of art in the cultural field, which I understand in the most literal meaning of the term: As cultivation of values we inherit from our past and that we will bequeath to future generations. In my reflections, art and nature complete each other, differently from the long philosophical tradition that opposes both. My intention is to talk about art as an extension of nature and of nature as the reason of being for works of art.

            Complementarity between art and nature is present both in works created thousands of years ago and in those made just a few decades back, such as land art interventions. It also manifests through the invention of gardens, the representation of landscapes, and solitary actions by artists who approached the ephemeral passing of human beings on earth with poetry.

Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Blind Orion Looking for the Sun. Oil on canvas, 119,1 x 182,9 cm. The Met, NYC

            In Arte e natureza [Art & Nature], works created in different times and places, with different purposes, are the starting point for aesthetic and philosophical investigations on the relationships of human beings with the whole that is part. Information and subscriptions here.

Arte e natureza [Art & Nature]

Where: online

When: Wednesdays, from 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm BRT

Duration: 8 sessions