ARTiculAction Art Review - Special Issuue Aug. 2016 | Page 81

Steve Barnard

ICUL CTION
C o n t e m p o r a r y

A r t

R e v i e w

Special Issue

order to do that I have to put my own
past experiences to transmit an idea, I
know that every individual has a
different background but we as a
society have global values that
transcend borders, so, I think that my
work is in fact an open statement that
tries to emphasize our own time and
place here on this planet.
Our contemporary society is more
visual, images have almost the same
communication now as words, so we
are always seeing billboards,
propaganda, ads, etc with thousands of
photographs these days. We need to
have a certain filter to stop and think of
what the image is trying to
communicate. As the late John
Szarkowski said “It isn’t what a picture
is of, it is what it is about“
The theme of landscape is very
recurrent in your imagery and it never
plays the role of a mere background:
you rather seem to address to viewers
to extract a narrative behind the
images you select, to establish direct
relations with the spectatorship.
German multidisciplinary artist
Thomas Demand once stated that
"nowadays art can no longer rely so
much on symbolic strategies and has
to probe psychological, narrative
elements within the medium instead".
How would you describe the function
of the evokative places you select from
landscapes?

Landscapes play an important role on
my body of work, I see them as a part
of the whole picture, I mean, they are
all part of the same context within the
image, but also, the background plays

29