Similarly to how the landscape of our world has transformed throughout the years, the landscape painting genre has also evolved throughout history. Transforming from an unacknowledged art form to the key subject of some of the most famous paintings in the history of art. Emerging in 6th Century China, landscape painting has gone from being a setting for telling mythological, biblical and historical narratives during the Renaissance, to celebrating humanity’s taming of nature in pastoral landscapes or reflecting on the sheer power of the natural in sublime representations, to becoming deconstructed and focused on feeling and light with the Impressionists, and finally to an amalgamation of its preceding moments in the present. A history that Wagner and Luís actively and purposefully engage with via a pictoric fascination with the genre that allows them to deconstruct the landscape through an engagement with the unsettled, undetermined, and indefinite.

Constantly toeing the line between the figurative and abstract, Alexandre Wagner’s paintings share a common quality: the creation of a space that both is and isn’t a landscape. Employing an undulating motion that suggests horizon lines and other natural formations through his focus on the movement of the wrist controlling the brush, he makes the figurative gradually dissipate into an exploration of color, light, and most importantly repetition. Disorienting in their non-linearity and imbued with a meditative, mantra-like rhythm, Wagner’s paintings rely on the repetition of gesture and form –insofar as one painting seems to bleed or continue in the next– to question the fragility of meaning and the way it can be dissolved and/or reconstructed. Assembled through the layering of highly diluted paint, Alexandre resists the urge to use white, instead appearing to remove paint in order to reveal light within his imaginal landscapes. Titled after naturally occuring formations, plants, or geologic materials, his paintings connect to the particular Brazilian context of their creation and yet retain the indefiniteness of a dream, a memory or an imagined realm.

Similarly, Hélio Luís’ paintings depict a space located somewhere between reality and his imagination. Sourcing from literature, photography, archival cinema, and his own memories, Luís confronts the fraught and complex legacies of painting by contextualizing them within his personal and familial history. Producing dreamlike scenes that have a basis in the local landscapes of his surroundings or memories, and engaging in an exercise that samples and brings together different epochs, styles, and artists —from Pierre Bonnard’s Post-Impressionism, to Francisco Goya, and even Mark Rothko’s Abstract Expressionism. Employing figurative imagery as a starting point, his canvases develop over long periods of time, layer by layer, and juxtapose the vibrant hues of boldly expressionistic gestures with traditional figurativism. Thus retaining remnants of the recognizable to create collisions between the past and present on canvas.