The Oblique Landscapes exhibition, devoted to the landscape as its title suggests, presents works by 15 artists, belonging to the Berardo Collection and to private collections and art galleries displayed in two separate spaces. Its aim is to revisit the genre with a fresh eye and map the plurality of visions whose confluence comprises the “return to the landscape” trend that we have seen in art for some twenty years now.
 
The Museum of Faro is showing works by artists who use different media to tackle the representation of nature and landscape from a contemporary perspective. The exhibition offers a wide-ranging vision that contemplates landscape in every sense – natural, urban, industrial, empty, infinite, imaginary, ephemeral – with the coordinates of its day. These may take the form of natural disasters, of increased population pressure – be it urban, industrial or touristic. Together with our realisation of the ceaseless convulsions of a landscape in transition and of the transitory status we increasingly see in it, it is its plasticity, its potential for transformation that is proposed as a source of reflection and fascination.
 
Galeria Arco Site Specific
 
At the second site of the Oblique Landscapes exhibition, three creations by Alexandre Joly including a new site-specific installation can be seen in the Galeria Arco at the Toy Museum. In these works, the Swiss artist establishes a dialogue with nature by presenting a ludic group of pieces that revisit the genre of the still-life.
 
The works that Joly presents in this exhibition, such as Migration; Wild Duck Twist or Absolute sine, both dating from 2009, make reference to phenomena from the natural and cultural world and reveal the gradual metamorphoses that construct and deconstruct our vision of the world.
 
His installations are characterised by an eclectic constellation of environments and objects, visually exuberant, frequently constructed out of common reproductions, with a dubious and openly artificial appearance, and natural objects with their origin in plants or animals. These works are still-lifes in their characteristic suspension of a time before the decline; an ironic aspect of the artist’s concept here is to reconstitute this classic effect by using representations that interpose new layers between this crystallised time and the viewer’s perception. The result, incorporating impressions of the landscape, projects a cosmic vision that permeates the ambiance of the surrounding environment.