CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/3/2019

In 'Landscape Painting Now,' painting as experience

Will Cotton's "Forest" (2003) is reproduced from Landscape Painting Now, a featured title at our bookstore at Frieze New York 2019. "A picture—above all a painted picture—can be an experience," Barry Schwabsky writes, "in one way for the person who makes it and in other ways for the people who come into contact with it. The gesture of offering one kind of experience as a way of conveying an idea about a different one is a species of metaphor, and that seems to be the spirit in which many of today's painters of landscape present their works. A landscape painting is not necessarily a representation of a landscape, but rather something that, in being constructed out of pieces of representation, or possibly just echoes of former representations, kindles an experience of its own—one that, as those fragments of resemblance suggest, is somehow like an experience of nature."