CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/3/2019

Constructed reality in 'Landscape Painting Now'

Amy Bennett's "Nothing New under the Sun" (2016) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now, our not-so-sleepy contemporary landscape painting survey, which released last week. Included in primary author Barry Schwabsky's chapter on Constructed Realities, Bennett's work sits beside paintings by Will Cotton, Cinta Vidal, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Merlin James, Gillian Carnegie, Alex Kanevsky, Adrian Ghenie, Lisa Yuskavage, Inka Essenhigh, Mark Tansey, Vincent Desiderio, Justin Mortimer and Jean-Pierre Roy. "Paintings that highlight their own constructedness never let you take too seriously the old picture-as-window idea," Schwabsky writes. "They keep reminding you that, whatever you think you see in them, you're never just seeing through them; you have to see how they make their propositions about reality in order to judge them, and that means you have to see that the proposition about reality is also a proposition about poiesis, which is simply the Greek word for "making."