Histoire et destin - My dreams they’ll never surrender 2014

This is an image made by Gian Maria Tosatti, born in 1980. It's a photo of an installation featuring wheat inside an arched room. Can you imagine how that came about? I can almost feel the weight of the air in that cavernous space, the scent of damp stone mixing with the dry, golden aroma of wheat. The light spills from the window. I wonder if it felt almost biblical in there, that juxtaposition of decay and new life, like some kind of crazy dream. There’s a physical aspect to that medium. It invites our touch, our engagement. How did he decide to bring the outside in? Tosatti’s installation reminds me of some of the land art I’ve seen, and also reminds me of the still life paintings of wheat fields made by Van Gogh. It makes you think about the history of art and how artists are in dialogue. Here, this artist takes a traditional landscape and stuffs it into a dark, musty room. This kind of unexpected move is, to me, what makes art interesting.