The Postcard, the Garden, and the Atom
Those who frame are makers of boundaries. It is about creating a sacred place. The window, like the painting, turns a fragment of the world into a temple. The window creates the garden just as the painting intensifies the scene it isolates. The void surrounds the painted figures. This insularity must be understood through Epicurus' atomic physics.
Pascal Quignard
The Postcard, the Garden, and the Atom is a pictorial investigation into the constructed landscape, the boundaries that shape our notion of nature, painting, and perception.
The painting, like the garden, is a domesticated place. The garden is nostalgia for nature. The word garden comes from ghorto—enclosure, fence. The idea of a boundary marking the space where things happen.
What happens within those boundaries is painting itself, the landscape, history, the omen.
"To delimit a sacred space, a kind of templum, within which everything that outside the frame fades and dissolves into natural entropy is concentrated, exalted, and ordered. The garden, like the painting, aspires to be a monad, a total part, an islet, a paradise..."
1 (Roger, Alain. p.38)
The garden as a painting is an idea of landscape that exists only in the mind. It does not refer to any specific country and its boundaries are those of the observer’s fictitious contract. In line with the notion of nostalgia for a pre-mythic world, a nomadic landscape without a model.
"The garden itself is both presentation and representation. In the most varied traditions and across centuries, it represents the idea of paradise—that is, a transcendent and inaccessible sphere, the ultimate place beyond representation. Therefore, the real presence of the garden refers, both visually and conceptually, to a mythical and distant invisibility."
2 (Jakob, Michel. Year p.11)
Presentation and representation. The idea of representing nature through nostalgia stems from the recognition of a relationship of loss. Beyond the mythical rupture, the original expulsion from paradise, there is a contemporary rupture—the expulsion from a landscape that our species is increasingly unable to preserve.
The garden is the ordered landscape. It is what we create to ease our condition as exiles from the natural kingdom, from the fierce and unique pre-mythic earthly paradise.
Postcards are the memory of a memory. The garden, too, is the memory of times and places traversed only by the mythical shadows of order. If it were not for all that memory built upon the grass, for those places that exist only through windows…
A window that returns your gaze is like a mute presence in the light.
The painting, like the garden, is then a delimited space where a mythical and distant invisibility is arranged through colour, forms, and representation. A space that can embrace the figure as a gesture of reconciliation.
The painting is also the garden we observe through the window. Those of the garden—that was the name given to the followers of Epicurus. His philosophical school was a suburban garden.
The idea of insularity in atomic physics also speaks of the singularity of the figure in relation to its surroundings. This is how I conceive our presence in the world and the figure/ground relationship in my painting. But it is also the habitual relationship of rare, isolated, and anonymous figures in postcards with their environment.
The postcard, the garden, and the atom are the three elements that shape this idea of a landscape as a temple, from which to reflect on our place in the world and our role in relation to nature.
- Alain Roger, Brief Treatise on Landscape (Biblioteca Nueva, 2007).
- Jakob, Michel. Le jardin et les arts, les enjeux de la représentation (Siruela, 2010).
Alejandra Freymann
