Whenever I come across Ingrid Pollard’s conceptual photographs, as a white British male, I feel as if the landscape has been ripped out from under me. When Pollard looks at British geography, he sees the enslaving past in every hill and valley. For her, a day at the beach was ruined because slave ships once crossed that sea.
I wish it had now been included in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s gentle, somewhat aimless survey of Black landscape art. It would definitely make this a more pointed and contrasting experience. On the other hand, perhaps the exhibition should have included more works by Scottish-Barbadian artist Alberta Whittle. He has three paintings in Soulscapes: Surreal, circular tropical island landscapes that make you smile. But in Whittle’s artistic productions, these are playful moments in a much more serious and comprehensive project. Sunken houses and improvised altars chart the long shadow of slavery through a range of approaches to history and geography, including videos and performances. Would you call his work landscape art?
Yes – but in the way artists have been doing it since the 1960s, with a wide range of unrecognizable means, expanded from Richard Long walking the earth to Veronica Ryan splitting seed pods. To be fair, there is no room for this kind of creativity in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s cramped exhibition space; When you install an upside-down tree, a third of that room is gone.
But there are both imaginary and physical limitations to this show. Politically radical but aesthetically conservative. And as a result, he’s not that politically radical either. Soulscapes is dominated by painting. Even his photography and video works have a pictorial beauty. I’m all for painting, but it’s not easy to make it fresh and urgent.
Hurvin Anderson achieves this. In his painting, Limestone Wall, a mysterious, decaying piece of architecture can be seen through the lush green plants and trees that cover it. As nature overflows with human texture, Anderson invites you to lose yourself in its seductive, powerful colors. You are drawn into the mist of emerald green pigment that splashes across the paint surface with a moist, autonomous hue. It is a dreamlike painting that crosses the boundary between landscape art as a record of space and landscape art as a vehicle for emotion: a soulscape if ever there was one.
However, the quality of the other images here doesn’t quite match this one. This is no surprise. Painting is so difficult. A work may seem beautiful for a minute or two, then begin to disintegrate in your mind, until it becomes just dried debris on the wall. A grand abstraction by Michaela Yearwood-Dan is too dense and exaggerated to be impressive or memorable. A dappled woodland by Alain Joséphine is comforting to look at but utterly bland, and very close to something a painter submitted to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition on Sunday.
Oh yes, R.A. This lofty institution is currently eviscerating its own history with the Entangled Histories exhibition, which reveals inevitable connections to the enslavement of an institution founded in 1768. The Dulwich Picture Gallery is almost as old; His collection was assembled at a time when Britain’s industrial revolution was fueled by slave-powered plantations and colonial trade. Is this something Dulwich should tear itself apart? At least in a show about race and landscape art, the consequences could be explored.
The political history of landscape painting is explored in the Soulscapes catalogue, but the works on the wall do not challenge or subvert the classical examples in the main collection. One of these is Canaletto’s 1754 masterpiece A View of Walton Bridge; This work is full of small figures, all white and wearing wigs, as far as I can see, fishing, boating, traveling. It’s an image of this green and pleasant land that screams to be parodied and pastiched.
But Soulscapes has almost no interest in British landscapes. Instead, she dreams of spending time in lush tropical getaways. The effect is ultimately soporific. In an age of recycling images, painting can easily become cliché. Ravelle Pillay’s landscape, with its human-free equatorial jungle and reflected in eerie still waters, exerts a sinister power. But then, at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, I started to see afterimages of the forest and even hear the whirring of helicopters. Was I responding to the painting or to the pool of familiar images we all share? To make matters worse, the way the water was painted started to remind me of Peter Doig’s pastoral art. This really impressed me. Doig’s elusive, thought-provoking scenes feature in this exhibition: his strange images are seemingly inescapable in contemporary approaches to landscape painting.
Too much here is trite or sentimental, including one episode called Joy. Extremely enjoyable, Soulscapes welcomes kitsch.
• Soulscapes is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, from 14 February to 2 June