Visual dialogue

An encounter with the paintings by the established Berlin-based Swede Peter Frie comes as a breath of fresh and insightful air to the British contemporary art scene. The dozen or so works (large-scale oil landscapes and a few still-lives) are displayed in stunning contemporary settings: a glass gallery and an adjacent artists’ house at Roche Court (a period house with grounds, better known for its sculpture programme).

Landscape painting has not fared well within the dictates of modernist and post-modernist art definitions. It is as if an urban-centric, text-driven and often anti-aesthetic dogma has stifled both alternative discourse and individual human expression. Yet our experience of landscape, and by association Nature, is fundamental to the development of our senses, perceptual vocabulary and cognitive awareness.