VISIONS OF CHANGING LANDSCAPES

The Venetian painter Bodo Gaston Böhm (Venice, 1980) is apparently on the same wake as this environmental tendency that permeates some part of the art world, at least the one that isn’t concerned with self-referential subjects. In his oil paintings he confronts the viewer with the extreme consequences of human intervention on the environment. One after another, Böhm creates landscapes of pure destruction, in which Mother Earth is shown shattered into pieces. e paintings could seem like visions of distant planets, but they are in fact drawn from actual photographs. Mankind is completely absent from the picture: desertification and laceration of the world’s surface, barren and sterile plates. There is yet another hint at mankind in Böhm’s paintings: one feels the presence of man due to the choice of representing a landscape with the traditional horizon constructed through para-mathematical perspective.

The choice of painting landscapes with a traditional perspective seems to point at the fact, that salvation (both of mankind and nature) is still up to us, or at last this is what the artist may believe. In a work for a group exhibition in Venice held in June 2012, though, Böhm has overlaid his paintings with large paper sheets, in order to extract its texture by frottage: the landscapes were transformed into pure matter put onto a surface, like particles seen through a microscope. These drawings inspire a whole bunch of contrasting sensations: the feel of smoothness as opposed to roughness, stiness and exibility, balance and mixture.