Parallel Conditions is a visual conversation between artists Roei Greenberg and Ian Malhotra that explores their shared interest in how landscape is experienced and communicated. A form of responsive collaboration, the exhibition includes new drawings by Malhotra that were created in response to Greenberg's photographs.

 

During their studies at Royal College of Art in London, where they completed their MAs in 2020, Greenberg and Malhotra developed a creative friendship built on shared artistic interests. This exhibition is their first collaborative pursuit, deepening the synergies between their practices that emerged at RCA.

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Moving beyond the land and its features, the artists consider landscape as an idea and a performative space. They walk through landscape – real or virtual – to explore, encode and claim it through their own artistic systems. Striving for transcendence in their creative practices and the emotions they hope to evoke in the viewer, they recognise the inherent impossibility of this endeavour. Their work raises questions about our physical access to landscape and the feeling of belonging in it. 

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In influence and metaphor, parallels can be drawn between their work and the lenses of travel, virtual play and art historical discourse on landscape representation. Reference points include the seventeenth-century-born Grand Tour, the American road trip and attendant photographic histories, Romantic landscape painting and the coding residing behind virtual worlds.

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Travelling through the landscape, Greenberg encounters zones of inclusion and exclusion, territory markings communicating possession. In the slow process of image-making, he arranges objects and shapes in spatial relation with near-forensic precision. Compositional devices echo throughout – fences, paths, roads and walls signal and divide landscape. Initially suggestive of something familiar or archetypal, these piercingly detailed photographs reveal an underlying irony. Traces of humanity and the artist’s interventions, often humorous, propose a modern Eden spoilt, perfection sabotaged. These ruptures subvert perceived documentary intentions, suggesting ambiguity in meaning and critiquing traditional representations of landscape.

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Where the purity of sharpness is given primacy in Greenberg’s photographs, Malhotra’s drawings use the staccato of Morse code to signify landscapes. Synthesising appropriated scenes – Greenberg’s work, art historical references, screenshots taken from video games, 3D terrain mapping and CGI – Malhotra becomes both a translator and a human printer. In this embodied process of making, 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. Laden with reference, titles are compositional backbones and direct how we can read the work.

 

Each work takes Malhotra more than 100 hours to create. It is a deliberately slow, meticulous rendering. Fractures in visual information reveal slippages in translation. Much like how we interpret pixels into images on a phone, the viewer must bridge the breaks between marks, piecing together meaning from visual gaps. Alluding to the symbolic and hierarchical nature of language, meaning is relative to one’s positioning.

 

For both artists, the frame is a compositional and conceptual device, directing us to see through, beyond, or even back at the landscape that once (or never) was. They are also framed possessions of journeys – real and virtual. Malhotra’s work here responds to Greenberg's, yet they exist not in sequence but in parallel dialogue. Their conversation creates something stronger, deepening our curiosity about both worlds and the idea of landscape itself. 

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- Madeline Yale Preston