Dutch Landscape

Dutch Landscape – Rotterdam-based artist José Quintanar presents the next instalment of his ongoing series dealing with the notion and tradition of landscape painting in the Netherlands. ‘Dutch Landscape’ is an exercise in synthesising a traditional art historical subject in the Netherlands into a simple drawing game using very rudimentary rules and constrictions. Playing with the concept of colonisation and setting, the book works as a protocol, as a ritual, or as a narrative device in which the same landscape is drawn again and again until it disappears. This volume compiles both previous and new work produced for the series.

“Seven years ago, I came to live in the Netherlands. Six years ago, I started working on the concept of the Dutch landscape. Nature and its representation have been key themes in the art history of this country, from the landscape paintings of the golden century to the conceptual art of Jan Dibbets. Influenced by Gertrude Stein’s idea of landscape in literature and the constructive development of all kinds of games, my interest is not so much in the representation of nature, but in the nature of representation — that is, how the drawing is constructed. Or, when the representation of a landscape becomes another landscape.”