Dutch Landscape 17

Solo exhibition at Florence Loewy Gallery. Paris, France.

18th November 2023 - 13th January 2024

Dutch Landscape is an artistic and research project José Quintanar have been working on since he moved to Netherlands in 2016. As a major historical theme, the landscape was perceived as a fictional reality by Dutch Golden Age painters. Instead of depicting what they saw, their interest lay in creating an illusion. This project shares the same initial concept: it’s not about representing nature, but exploring the nature of representation. In other words, it is about when the representation of the landscape transforms into another landscape. It shares the same process of how a drawing is constructed, element by element, following its own set of laws and rules. The drawing of a landscape, like a prosthesis, is structured within a book. A book that becomes a landscape – a phantom image that you can’t see but is present.

On the occasion of his show at Florence Loewy, José Quintanar presents for the first time his latest project, Dutch Landscape 17, among a range of books in this series. Dutch Landscape 17 is a book that doesn’t consume paper, but parasites existing books. A dutch landscape and a drawing of it. A landscape of 78 lines, arranged and placed inside a book of 12 pages, from 1 to 12 lines. A book as a landscape drawn by hand inside another book. A landscape within a landscape. 78 books found at second-hand markets in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and The Hague throughout 2023. Cookery books, children’s books, architecture books, art books, archaeology books, manuals, literature, atlases, or commercial catalogues. A library of books that have never been brought together before, which in some way define the cultural and social landscape of a territory.