Telúricos
Exhibition Text by Pedro Magalhães
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Ozymandias, PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 1817
For the romantics landscape was a divine entity. Everything, even inanimate life, had a life of its own, the splendor of nature dwarfed humanity’s effort to give it a utilitarian use. To paraphrase Byung-Chul Han, humanity violated nature from the moment it conceived it as a mean-to-an-end that serves its own goals[i]. This is why, I believe, the landscapes that Loraine or Albert Bierstadt used to feature small human figures, sometimes even imperceptible, against an amazing natural scenery of unfathomable detail.
There’s something in nature that is too familiar to us. A beautiful landscape is relieving, it invokes a contemplative mood that is so alien to the life in cities. Cities resemble something which I think the closest representation is the maze; you can never see beyond your immediate surroundings and constantly feel lost. Whereas the earthly sceneries are associated with the true origin of life, the exultant energy of planetary life in its most archaic forms.
The idea of a landscape as a representation of this idea is only natural. One could say that if what essentially describes nature is the idea of repose (it’s been like that for a very long time, one could say of a mountain), then a city is the complete opposite. You are judged in the city, while in the primal nomadic life with nature there’s no one to judge you but maybe God himself through his creations. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Where is God? God is everywhere, it’s the solemn sky with broken clouds and sunbeams slashing though endless cornfields, it’s in the bark of a tree, it’s the crushing of life under hot lava brimming from the tallest mountain in sight.
Nature and time, we will never exceed their power. Like Ozymandias -and humanity as a whole- all the power in the world that humanity can wield is inevitably crushed by time. What its ruin presents is that every man-made thing gets reabsorbed by nature in an irreversible process of dissolution and decay[ii]. Mankind is always looking for the worthy adversary, something that makes him stay his hand.
What brought Ozymandias to his absolute dissolution is primitive to nature. What we see in the landscape is how the world was, is, and will be. We see geography, an everlasting process of transformation that gives way to life and death without pause nor borders between one thing and another. Empires, like Ozymandias’, dissolve and collapse by the weight of their own existence, we’re nothing but clay figures in a fog of blue.
Cezanne already realized in his time that a landscape is a task about recognition, because nature truly has no boundaries. And, no matter what the artist intends to do, he will always end up painting that in which he recognizes meaning.
Death is a debt to nature due, which I have paid, and so must you[iii] said the epitaph in Tyrone Slothrope’s grandfather tombstone. Might as well have been in Ozymandias’ pedestal. But, like a friend once told me, death can also imply the survival of other things.
Pedro Magalhães
[i] Vita Contemplativa, Byung-Chul Han, 2023.
[ii] The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Craig Owens, 1980.
[iii] Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon, 1973