Italiensk fantasilandskab 1763

Curator: Well, this looks faded, almost like a memory struggling to hold its form. Editor: You've hit upon something there. We’re looking at Jens Petersen Lund’s "Italiensk fantasilandskab" from 1763. It's a landscape created with drawing, etching, and watercolor on paper, housed right here at the SMK. Curator: A fantasy, you say? It does feel dreamt, with those washed-out terracotta hues. It is giving me sun-soaked Roman Holiday vibes… like a half-remembered afternoon. Editor: Fantasies, as sites of utopian longing, must be critically interrogated. It is hard not to be drawn into a world that romanticizes the ruins of empire... I can only see this image as an uncritical gaze towards Europe. But how can we disrupt the aestheticization of history here, what meanings do we extract and bring with us into the contemporary world? Curator: Oof, heavy. But okay, yes, Lund gives us this beautifully decayed vista... a crumbling villa, a lone figure perched on a wall, as though lost in thought, with wisps of figures in the foreground...It feels both inviting and unsettling, a shadow world rendered with the lightest of touches. Like time has gently nibbled at it, exposing the ghost underneath. What of these subjects’ interiority? How can we find joy, solace, hope? Editor: The lone figure immediately brings to mind ideas about orientalism, and the power of the European gaze, but the piece has another life beyond those contexts. Its creation was contemporaneous with some other major geopolitical shifts in the balance of imperial powers. But here there is also room to ask about its compositional elements, its materiality, its capacity to trigger in you the affects and possibilities that are unsaid and unfelt. I can definitely consider that. Curator: See, that’s the bit that snags my soul—those hidden possibilities. It is whispering to me about fragility. In some sense, even the mightiest empires crumble to dust, become watercolor memories on paper... What of the figures? Lost. It gives us power, too. Editor: Perhaps its power lies in visualizing something just beyond our reach: those silent spectres. This vision offers us something that is incomplete and imagined as real. A potent thing indeed.