An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter / Beatrice Bonino / Hanne Darboven / Henriette Gudin / Pati Hill / Cornelis Huysmans / Willem Key / 03 10 2025 - 05 11 2025
In his short novel An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, César Aira recounts an episode in the life of the German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas during his travels in Latin America in the mid-nineteenth century. A disciple of Alexander von Humboldt, Rugendas sought to establish a physionomy of nature, approaching landscape painting with the rigor of a scientist and borrowing from both science and art their most exacting strategies. He believed such a systematic method could reveal the truth of nature, granting his practice an epistemological value and securing his place within the lineage of modern knowledge. In the midst of this enterprise, however, while working with great discipline and drawing equally on his painterly skill and his geographical training, Rugendas was struck by lightning and left permanently disfigured. For the rest of his life, he bore on his face the rocky landscape he had gone to seek in the Andes. Despite his impaired vision, he continued to paint, his work now animated by a renewed and involuntary intimacy with the very world he had set out to describe.
This ambivalent figure of the landscape painter, both scientist and witness, methodical and exposed, serves as a framework for the exhibition. The title did not precede the works though, it arose once they had been assembled, not as a programmatic statement but as a question that seemed to traverse them: what becomes of the will to systematize and to represent when the act of working itself, with its repetitions and contingencies, becomes the subject of the work?
In the nineteenth century, a French critic described Cornelis Huysmans in these terms: “By opposing the brilliant fractures of these limestone rocks to the yellowish-greens of the vegetation and the savory blue of the distances, Huysmans achieved a harmonious effect from these contrasts; yet their overly frequent repetition lends his paintings, dispersed across the museums of Europe, a regrettable appearance of uniformity.” The remark is not inaccurate, but it misses what this recurrence might signify. Huysmans spent his life painting variations of the same scene: a path bordered by trees, a group of rocks, a portion of sky wide enough to contain clouds that he seemed to enjoy painting. The four paintings preserved in the Louvre attest to this persistence. What the critic saw as monotony might instead be understood as a form of fidelity, a slow and continuous rehearsal of vision, in which repetition functions less as limitation than as method. To repaint the same path is to measure time against the act of painting itself, to let the work accumulate as a sediment of duration. The repetition of subject becomes a record of endurance, transforming depiction into an index of life spent at work.
A century and a half later, in 1991, Walter Smerling visited Hanne Darboven at her family home in Hamburg to film a documentary. She received him in her study, seated behind a long table, surrounded by shelves overflowed with the thousands of pages she had filled over the years, rows of notebooks, calendars, and handwritten sheets. Unsure what to make of this ocean of writing, Smerling asked her with solemn, almost naïve curiosity: “What is, in the end, the true object of your work?” Darboven replied: “Life, writing, these pages that I fill daily. To feel each day approaching the final sum of my work.” Huysmans could have said the same. The exchange clarifies the paradox of her practice, a gesture at once mechanical and existential, where the repetition of inscription becomes the very measure of life. Darboven embodied Sol LeWitt’s idea of the artist operating “merely as a clerk cataloging the results of the premise” more consistently than any of her contemporaries. Her daily pages turned the calendar into a visual structure of lived duration, transforming time itself into material.
In 1975, Pati Hill, after nearly a decade devoted to raising her children, published Slave Days, a book combining twenty-nine poems with thirty-one xerographic images of domestic objects. The book marked the beginning of a practice that would occupy her for the rest of her life, photocopying the objects that surrounded her: clothing, household tools, even carcasses. The photocopier became her medium and her metaphor. Hill spoke of it as a way of “withdrawing,” a mechanical process that enabled her to produce what she called “objective works.” The procedure mirrored Rugendas’s ambition to depict nature with scientific detachment. Yet within this apparent neutrality, her images convey a deep melancholy. The copied objects, floating in the black field of the machine, appear both spectral and precise, detached from use yet preserved in exact likeness. Their mechanical fidelity conceals an affective intensity, an attention to the ordinary that becomes, through repetition, almost devotional.
From this perspective, Béatrice Bonino’s Néons (sentence) can be read as a continuation of these gestures. Composed of hundreds of meters of folded fabric condensed into a minimal sculptural form, the work articulates a space that is both real and withdrawn. The folds operate as both structure and metaphor, a topography of concealment and revelation. Like Hill’s photocopies and Darboven’s pages, Bonino’s work records the tension between the procedural and the affective.
Taken together, these works articulate a shared attitude toward the real. Each replaces representation with registration, description with accumulation. Yet within this insistence on method, whether in Huysmans’s reiterated landscapes, Darboven’s serial inscriptions, or Hill’s mechanical transcriptions, something else emerges, of the order of affect, of the imaginary, perhaps even of the sacred. It is there, in that interval between order and contingency, between work and life, that one might glimpse an episode, fleeting, discontinuous, perhaps accidental, in the life of a landscape painter.
