A meditative journey through some forests in art

Abstract

The great dense and obscure European forest disappeared in proportion to the growth of cities, especially from modernity. In the same measure of the disappearance of the real forests it is increased in the territory of the culture in general and in the plastic arts in particular. The forest thus assumes itself as archetype or index of the natural and is in its best examples of the art always revisited by a persistent expression crossed by the dream and the nostalgia. In the representations of forests made by artists who wanted to recover, from the aesthetic point of view, these landscapes from within, we can find perhaps one of the most distant roots of the questioning or relativization of the idea of landscape as a view or window, in favor of a idea of landscape as wandering or involvement. This questioning also seems to bring with it the expression or translation of the first ethical foundation which makes recognition of nature as something absolutely superior to man. This is because most representations of forests made from within reveal a certain aesthetic negative character that induces the spectator mobility, discomfort, estrangement, forcing him to inquire and articulate together aesthetics and ethics.