Roei Greenberg and Ian Malhotra picture landscape both as an idea and as a performative space. Through the photographic discourse of Greenberg and the coded language of Malhotra’s mark making, landscape becomes a site of translation and transformation. Using different languages of communication (real or virtual), they walk through landscape to explore, encode and ultimately claim it through their own artistic systems.

 

In influence and metaphor, parallels can be drawn between their practices and the lenses of travel, virtual play and art historical discourse on landscape representation. The seventeenth-century-born Grand Tour, the American road trip and attendant photographic histories, the evocative pursuits of Romantic landscape painting and the digitally encoded language underlying virtual worlds are a few of the devices utilised to question our perceptions and interactions with natural environments. Both artists create self-led exercises that respond to these references to consider ways to unthink how we are conditioned to see. Central to their practices is the exploration of one’s place relative to the landscape, positioning the viewer’s experience as one of solitary encounter. Acknowledging the utter fallibility of the task, each strive to transcend everyday life – both in their creative process and in emotions they hope to evoke in the viewer.

 

Greenberg’s practice, partly autobiographical, is shaped by historical narratives and his questions about the relationship between identity and landscape. He positions the experience of walking in the landscape as ideologically political, where one’s mobility within space and sense of belonging is performed through access. Journeying to landscape, often with a large format view camera, he encounters zones of inclusion and exclusion, territory markings that have embodied various systems of possession, colonisation and ownership. These can guide how the landscape is to be encountered and framed – a form of control and power.

 

In the slow process of image-making, Greenberg composes his scenes with near-forensic precision, carefully aligning objects and shapes in spatial relation to one another. There is an intensity to his process. Drawing a parallel to Romantic English landscape painting, at times in reference to Constable, his compositions communicate scale, expansiveness and spatial depth. They likewise recycle and critique the trope of depicting rural scenes to reflect and shape national identities. Initially suggestive of something familiar or even archetypal, these detailed photographs reveal an underlying irony, informed by his perception of landscape as a site of ambiguous meaning. Rising up from the weighted ground, the sky becomes prominent in many of Greenberg’s scenes (and also in Malhotra’s), democratising views of clouds that convey a spiritual intent and emotional freedom. In all his works, there is a psychological detachment, it is not an enmeshed experience for the viewer – rather it is observational, optical and distanced.

 

Greenberg’s compositions suggest a previsualisation of the scene, where in diverse locales he constructs landscapes that possess an uncanny resemblance. Compositional devices echo throughout. Carefully placed fences, paths, roads and walls signal and divide the landscape. He regularly includes traces of humanity and makes interventions – modern-day Eden is spoilt, perfection sabotaged. His own ruptures, which are subtle in some works and more overt in others, subvert perceived documentary intentions, signalling ambiguity in meaning and critiquing traditional representations of landscape. The presence of one object may be signified elsewhere. For example, a red land mine warning sign found on a fence in one scene is gestured in an upside-down McDonald’s French fries container in another. Bringing these photographs to exhibitionary form, they are possessions framed and testaments of journeys taken, recycling the idea of the Grand Tour custom of collecting landscape paintings – touristic souvenirs that symbolised wealth and distinction.

 

Where the purity of sharpness is given primacy in Greenberg’s photographs, Malhotra’s prints and drawings use the staccato of Morse code to signify landscapes. Taking ownership of images appropriated from diverse source material – art historical and contemporary references of landscape, screenshots taken from video games, 3D terrain mapping and CGI – Malhotra becomes both a translator and a human printer. This is an embodied process of making, where he transforms image into language, speaking it with his hands. Line by line, he ‘writes’ the landscape, the vertical marks showing how it functions as discourse.

 

Each work takes Malhotra more than 100 hours to create, perhaps in contrast to the perceived ease of digital image making. Labour is transformed into a slow process of meticulous rendering of simple elements – colour, light, shapes – to evoke a simulacrum of reality, where fractures in visual information are embraced to reveal slippage in translation. Laden with reference, each title forms the work’s compositional backbone and serves as a directorial cue, framing how to read each scene. Much like how we interpret pixels into images on a phone, the viewer bridges breaks between marks, piecing together meaning from visual gaps. This alludes to the symbolic and hierarchical nature of language – where (like in Greenberg’s work) meaning is relative to one’s proximity.

 

Malhotra uses the frame as a conceptual and compositional device to create experiences that are both familiar and transportive. As concept, it can allude to the increasingly mediated experience of life spent in virtual realms, where reality is framed through screens. Suggestive of window formats found in British post-WWII housing, the frames in Malhotra’s work are part of it, communicating the artist’s own lived experience of growing up in Birmingham. In the diptychs, triptychs and quadtychs, the framing breaks the landscapes. This creates the illusory effect of glass windowpanes with grilles disrupting a continuous read of each scene, placing the viewer inside the conceptual home, where they can metaphorically look through, beyond, or even back at the idyllic landscape that once (or never) was. This theatre of experience engenders a fantasy of travel, where one can depart the congested confines of urban England and its skyscapes to go somewhere altogether magical.

 

Blending diverse art historical and contemporary references, virtual worlds and personal experiences, Greenberg and Malhotra are walking along guided paths, performing the idea of landscape in their work. The constraints of their journeys are made visible and the illusion of infinite possibilities broken; the three-dimensional world is flattened and gazes are directed. In their own vernacular, their work becomes a mediated synthesis of the landscape. These ideas are extended in the exhibition, becoming a space where imagination collides with the artists’ shared experience.

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- Madeline Yale Preston