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Homeless Nash’s landscape images are imbued with an energy that stems from the absence of human figures. There is both loss and a desire for home that leaves a persistent void. In scenes made so uninhabitable, there can be no imaginable resting place for human life. To identify with a place there must be territories: places for memory to embed itself. When figure and ground are eroded, identity is lost. In B unker Archaeology , Paul Virilio describes an effect of the here and there , simultaneously and harshly realised on the battlefield. It becomes a place, determined by an invasion, where ‘energy’s area has become the locus of power.’ In this void of the battlefield ‘it is here, and not over there, that the critical is from now on played out.’ 4 This loss of reference, placement, possession, accounts for an inversion between the home and the foreign. Nash’s work as a war artist in France, unveiling alternative depictions of uninhabitable landscapes, reveals much about his own sub-conscious and the collective memory of a nation coming to terms with the invasion of the international modern
Fig. 4 Paul Nash, Landscape at Iden 192. Tate, London Painted shortly after the death of Nash’s father, emits absent presences, and tells us a story of the imminent threat of nature’s undoing. The elements displayed in the scene, are arranged like a stage set, which immediately opens us to a sense of arrival and departure. It is full of symbolism, as if we are about to witness a disturbing event. The scene shows signs of inhabitation by rural workers, but they, themselves, are absent. It seems as though their role in the scene is gradually being replaced by mechanisation. The sense of movement and duration grows from the stillness of the objects. Natural elements are subjected to a geometric ordering, causing a haunting, derived from the workers’ absences. In this painting, Nash finally realizes the undoing of the English landscape, through a gradual and methodic organisation by modern processes.
movement. Nash’s landscape paintings are narratives upon which an interplay is carried out – from an indulgence of memory to paradoxes of terror, violence and contradiction. What is reflected is the drama of modern encroachment. In the wake of territorialisation, through war, cities and infrastructure, the rural landscape is being remapped in such a way as to become uninhabitable. Violent tendencies suppressed in Nash’s work are exhibited through absences, pointing to an imminent collapse of the figure-ground arrangement. Fundamentally it concerns a feeling of homelessness, experienced by the artist, intensified by war and emotionally depicted with all its implications for humanity. c
4 Paul Virilio. Bunker Archaeology (1975) Princeton Architectural Press, 1997.
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