"Looking at the screens so as not to see the planet die"

-Kate Tempest

“Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground.”

-Hito Steyerl

“From the most intimate issues to the most collective, from the individual to the planetary, everything is done and undone under the shadow of a “until when””

-Marina Garces

The notion of landscape always implies the construction of a sense of habitation; our interaction with it exceeds the field of visual experience and is articulated in relations of power that are not only social but planetary, in which some fundamental conditions and dispositions of cultural life, or of his death, can be read...

In the history of Western painting, the "landscape" tradition has become a visual code that guides its viewer in a scheme that seeks to objectify the world from what is measurable, from what is mathematically knowable. This construction was developed hand in hand with a particular subjectivity whose sense of habitation unfolds in the promise of realization of that objective world, towards which it pours its increasingly industrialized, more technological, more globalized production, reaffirming a supposed domination of Man. about nature. In this sense, for painting, the landscape has never been a mere theme for representation, but the vehicle that projects its very understanding of representation as modes of apprehension.

In this understanding, Cecilia Barreto and Hugo Robledo rehearse landscapes whose apprehension does not display the promise of any future, but a disjointed present in which the signs of its construction appear as the signs of its own devastation (sharpness, clarity, perspective, measure. )… A landscaping whose project is empty. Condition of current life: no future, operation of a frenetic present on its mere inertia. And even his landscapes…

In this way, the notion of landscape acquires a meaning beyond the exercise of a visual extractivism to take it to one of production of the sense of habitation, an ontological sense that today involves a profound crisis. If the landscape has always represented the epistemological reach of the project of inhabiting the world, how can one project oneself in a world that no longer reaches?

We are before a critical painting, but not because it is distant for analysis, but because it participates in the crisis, a painting that is situated in the awareness of its two-dimensional condition: the superficial illusion and the world project that it implies. In the consciousness of this binomial we inhabit it as a posthumous landscape.