Vito Pace: "Svenska Landskap"
By Dr. Heiderose Langer 2008

A river, along the banks green bushes and trees, in the distance a bridge, blue sky – an unspectacular section of a landscape, presented in an empty shop. A photograph and a canvass of the same size painted as mirror of the photographed motif hang on the wall next to each other. It is impossible to differentiate between the two artistic media, the photograph and the painted reproduction, when looking through the window. Due to the spatial distance and the miniature-like format, the motif of the pictures cannot be recognised in detail but only in the type of picture. Plenty of blue and green complying with established conventions for illustrations: a picture of a landscape can be recognised, taken in Pforzheim, in duplicate, locked behind glass like in a large showcase.

The traditional picture of a landscape
There is hardly any other genre in visual arts that is as well-known and popular as the illustration of a landscape. In 1994 Komar and Melamid, a Russian artist-duo living in exile in  New York, had demoscopic research done as to which motif the American citizen would like to see in oil on a canvass. The result was a painting of a landscape, predominantly blue, an extensive sky and plenty of green. In 1767 Denis Diderot already writes that landscape canvasses were hung to the walls of their parlours by townsfolk to compensate for the loss of nature. Landscape pictures were the result of a mediation of aesthetically adopted nature.  After all,  by the subjective experience of what these people perceive when going out into the scenery and their artistic implementation thereof nature changes its faces. It becomes the grand, exultant and beautiful. Nature as landscape is thus the product of an intellectual process, a model that man has created for himself to understand nature, to idealise it, to charge himself emotionally, to get an ideological tinge and to project himself.

The Presentation
Two small pictures of the landscape, intentionally withdrawn from our direct access and the beholding thereof by Vito Pace, on the one hand make the borders and distance come to light, on the other hand they open up extensive space for ideas. If a landscape in its original significance of a "section of nature that is beheld" visualises the existence of "all-round nature", despite the limitations of the format, the empty room of the shop takes on the function of a limited frame – and yet leaves all open. There is an outdoor room in which the viewer stands and an indoor room, the room of the presentation of the pictures. Or would it be better to say there is a subjective indoor room which is the world of thoughts of the viewer who imparts his ideas and feelings to the exterior, to the room of the pictures?

Irritations set in. No contemplative dedication to the picture or the landscape is possible, distance and uncertainty define reception. Can the landscape motif copied from the photograph be considered art at all or only the product of a hobby painter? Is someone playing ironically and subtly with art and the part played by the artist? Vito Pace does not see himself as the producer of original pieces of art, but as a doer who transforms an anonymous place in town into a room for thought: The idea of landscape as representation of space, as an envelope for the perceived and the thought of.

The space in-between
The empty space between the pictures and the viewer is important. This confined and closed public room, converted into an exhibition room by installing two pictures of insignificant motifs which can be exchanged any time, arouses questions in connection with the practices of aesthetic processes, with the originality and the authorship and particularly in connection with the representation, reproduction and construction of reality and art. Nature is dominantly "the" reality, whereby the medially imparted section of the landscape chosen by man is a cultural construct, is manipulated and charged with wishes, yearnings and emotions. Man sways back and forth – between reality and illusion, between nature and culture, rationality and irrationality, vicinity and distance, perception and imagination.

[Deutsche Version]