Martin Greenland: Arrangements of Memory
Art Space Gallery, 84 St Peter’s Street, London N1, until 10 October
‘In Painting there must be something Great and Extraordinary to surprise, please and instruct, which is what we call the grand Gusto. ’Tis by this that ordinary things are made beautiful and the beautiful sublime and wonderful,’ wrote Roger de Piles in his Art of Painting, translated into English in 1706, extending the notion of the sublime from literature to painting and opening the road to Romanticism. Martin Greenland’s large, skilful, traditionally painterly landscapes bring us smack back from what Reynolds called ‘the little elegancies of art’ to the sublime. Andrew Lambirth’s persuasive introduction to the catalogue finds touches of Courbet, Corot and the Barbizon painters, also of Russian and American 19th-century landscapists such as Levitan and Frederic Church, but even Claude and Poussin peep out too.
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