Beyond Landscape 2021

The installation Beyond Landscape (2021) was made specially for EENWERK and reflects on the genre 'landscape painting'. The gallery space functions as a lens that zooms in deeply both on this art historic theme and on a specific landscape, deconstructed to its most elementary: light and matter, symbolized by earth pigments and gold.

“These are not landscapes in the traditional sense, vistas with billowing clouds rising above reclaimed land bordered by winding forest edges. Caspers' paintings show abstract views, with greyish slopes, ochre valleys and deep brown fields, shades of colour reminiscent of brittle pumice, grim showers or damp clay. The surfaces and shapes do not set us at a distance but invite us to come closer. Our eyes follow the contours of the incisions and undulations as if they were footpaths. The longer you stand before them, the more you lose yourself in the depth of the image. These are landscapes without recognisable elements, but nevertheless comprise a whole world. Where are we?”

Click here to read the complete essay accompanying the exhibition.

In 2022 Charlotte sampled some of the panels that formed the installation Beyond Landscape and zoomed in even more. When examined under a microscope, the tiny paint samples show the geology of the paint layers, revealing new landscapes. On this microscopic level one starts to wonder about the origins of the materials present: chalk formed out of fossils of minuscule marine life, wooden supports which once were trees in a forest and the elements in earth pigments that exist since the formation of our planet.

photos Peter Cox and Johanneke Verhave