Landscape Perceived 1963

Abdul Mati Klarwein's "Landscape Perceived" is like an archeological dig into a state of mind, with the painting itself as a world. You can imagine him layering earth tones, rusts, and ochres, maybe with tiny brushes—like he’s building up the very terraces he’s depicting. It's a meticulous kind of mark-making, not unlike the labor of constructing the landscape itself. I wonder if he had a photo or was painting from memory? I feel the artist channeling his inner cartographer and land surveyor, mapping out every nook and cranny. You can almost feel the Mediterranean sun beating down on the rocks, with a kind of hallucinatory clarity. But there's also something dreamlike about the scene, like a stage set. It reminds me a bit of some of the psychedelic landscapes of Ernst, or the visionary architecture of Hundertwasser. Artists are in a constant state of call and response, pinging off one another across time and space. That’s what keeps art alive, this endless, evolving conversation about what it means to be human and to perceive the world around us.