We explore the landscape in the contemporary painting from four diferent countries.

Galeria Contrast presents in Barcelona “Landscapes”, an exposition that will opens on the 25th of january and will keep going untill the 10th of march 2018. With four landscapist of different origin places; Adzer van de Molen from Holland, Lo Breillat from France, Jacob Brostrup from Denmark and Manuel Castillejo from Spain, we explore diverse types and them that inspire their landscapes on oil.

The reason of choosing artists who belong to different cultural environments, is to obtaing diverse perpsectives about the understanding and expression of the light and shape. So, in the same space you can find paintings and compositions very different between them; some with overlap and blurred images, emerged by the subconscious, and others more realistic, with clearer lines.

Description by the artist’s own view:

Adzer van der Molen

“The motives in the paintings relate to ideas about freedom and longing. Ideas that play a dominant role in our culture. The picture must originate from film stills and television images, photography. In movies often the landscape is a character too, as is obvious is westerns, likewise in Romanticism. There is no “reality” there are only metaphors. Titles of the works, derived from imagery and lyrics of songs, emphasize this. The symbolically layered work makes use of the landscape’s suggestive meaning; the contemporary, manufactured landscape in which isolated construction (fences, houses or roads) represents human endeavour. The paintings refer to the melancholy of forlorn dreams, lost ideals. The work has a romantic as well as an ironic side, is both reflective and lyrical.”

Jacob Brostrup

“Goethe said: We are surrounded and intertwined with nature, powerless to step out of it, and powerless to step further into it”. In the paintings for the exhibition at Frederikshavn, I investigated my living situation for the last four years, where I have been wintering in urban Barcelona and spending my summers in a forested area of Denmark. In the forest, you experience busy animals and the change of seasons. You observe and notice civilization in nature and nature in civilization. For example, in nature you see the squirrel’s collection of food supplies for the winter or the complex cooperation of ants. While in the city you can see Gaudi’s architecture, which mirrors fauna. It is the cycle that is recognizable, set in a relationship that is never ending and slow to change.“

Lo Breillat

“I lived successively in several countries in America, Africa and Europe. I collected a lot of pictures of different cultures, source of my inspiration. With intense colours and small brush strokes, I create a poetic world, somewhere between reality and imagination. A painter since childhood I have been fostering experiences traveling abroad, meeting people all along my trips. I paint with a palette knife, constructing large mosaics of pixelated landscapes and portraits, and « Land-faces », with great depth and strength. I like to say: « We are made of mosaics of emotions and cultural experiences…I like movement, animated painting, shivering colours; my work is on the move!»"

Manuel Castillero

“I am very interested on the idea of how human and society (which is created by us) go towards to an uncertain future. Cormac McCarthy, Saramago or Ernst Jünger have given to me some intellectual ideas that make up the pillar of my latest works where the era of titan (human and technology) is overcome by the one of the Gods represented by nature. On the artistic side, Turner and Friederich also have influenced a lot on me.”