Land-data geometries 2

The human relationship to nature is where one approaches the infinite. It is an immensity that attracts — and horrifies — at the same time. Andrea Papi references in his Land-Data Geometries Series the philosophical work of Immanuel Kant, whose writings on aesthetics in the Critique of Judgement explains the relationship of man to a hostile nature through the notion of the ‘Sublime’. Kant defines the Sublime as that feeling which arises in ourselves when we encounter something as a human being who, in our finiteness, cannot control — but to which we feel strongly attracted to and galvanised by at the same time. The Sublime becomes a somewhat ‘negative pleasure’; and through Papi’s gorgeous and thrilling landscape works, the artist brings the essence of the Sublime into contemporary art. Over the last years Papi’s continued research into the artistic genre of the landscape has focused on not only an ‘objective’ sense of its representation (such as in geographical maps, or scientific data) but also this veritable ‘subjective’ sense of its experience. The landscape becomes a site of social construction, how we map our earth and our space is one that contains societal and ideological changes. Papi looks to document the changes that occur and explore how they effect our perception of landscape today. This work is one of a series.