Nature’s drama

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The Israeli artist Iddo Markus has created installations of small uneven sized paintings, of landscapes set in grids resembling constellations such as Taurus; small vignettes of light and colour, for the show ‘For Want of a Nail’ at Threshold Gallery.

One can see that these works are a reaction to the European landscape painting tradition of the nineteenth through the twentieth century. The strongest paintings relate to the poetic landscape paintings of the English and French countryside. There is Turner’s sky, Constable’s divided spaces, Courbet’s field. Markus recreates through his paintings, the sense of space and light, offering an insight into the ways of playing with pictorial form, through which to express the drama or sweetness of nature. But, there is also a window into the emotional states of being to be associated with natural scenes — pastoral and romantic, that are the hallmark of the parent traditions as well as Markus’s renditions. The other works react to impressionist landscape, with their anti-academic but lyrical works. Rousseau, Corot and Sisley and later Monet can be recognised, with the emphasis on transient nature. The cypress trees, sparse leaves and golden fields are all suggested in his works. His works possesses a synecdoche like quality, as if of a visual shorthand where colour substitutes the naturalistic landscape and has an identifiable alterity, both towards conceptual and emotional constructs, as well as towards a diachronic evocation of history.
There are very few urban references in Markus’s paintings; an odd steeple or a modern skyline here or there, as they move from the idyllic to the contemporary. Built with a spirit of using the already existent, in terms of imagery as well as material (built as they are on woodblocks collected from different places) the artist highlights the continuities — painterly as well as emotional.