Painting at the Service of Clouds

José Antonio Ochoa

This exhibition explores the influence that the iconography of painter Caspar David Friedrich has had on cinema.

Following the line of previous projects—Ut Pictura Kinesis, Sustained Time, or Looking at Time—the works I present in this exhibition address two main themes: on the one hand, the relationship between cinema and painting, focusing primarily on a cinematic landscape with pictorial allusions; and on the other, the attempt to invoke the Romantic concept of the sublime and update its meaning in our times. I consider it relevant to bring up the discourse of the sublime in contemporary art because it addresses fundamental human experiences and questions that remain significant in today’s world. It is a discourse that raises questions rather than provides answers (on how I’ve approached these themes, I include some attached texts).

Unlike my previous projects, this one focuses exclusively on the figure of German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich and how his iconography has influenced cinematic imagery. Sometimes the references in cinematic images to the German painter’s work are clearly intentional; other times, without the director’s intent, they bear a strong resemblance to Friedrich’s iconography. I am not interested in discerning whether this is mere coincidence or not—what matters to me is the de facto presence of his visual language in cinema.

To explain my creative process, I refer to the text Ut Pictura Kinesis:

This project seeks to bring painting into dialogue with other contemporary representational languages—in this case, cinema—to claim the dialectical nature of the image with the intention of engaging the viewer. The aim is to suspend cinematic images in time, allowing them to be appreciated outside their movement, time, and space; to contemplate them—not as one would with cinema—but in pause and silence.

In my working process, I extract a frame from a film, thus decontextualizing an image. I act as though capturing a photograph from a narrative sequence, selecting what my eye decides is “the decisive moment.” However, sometimes, moving away from Cartier-Bresson’s concept, I seek to extend the time of that moment by integrating adjacent frames, relying on painting’s ability to convey a feeling of sustained time. I appropriate the striking image I need, along with its adjacent frames, to encapsulate their totality in painting. For me, cinema has already constructed this image and its sequence within the atmosphere of a painting set into motion. The frozen frames, renewed and intensified through painting, summon the presence of the landscape from the artificial nature of the cinematic image.

In doing so, I aim to create a postmodern Romantic vision of the landscape amid the overwhelming influence of media power, denouncing the barrenness of uniform dominant thought.

The starting point for this exhibition is two works by Friedrich housed in Room 3.06 of Berlin’s Old National Gallery (Alte Nationalgalerie): Monk by the Sea and Abbey in the Oakwood. My interest lies in the presence of these works in cinema. For this reason, I used film stills that reference these paintings to create my own versions, seeking that round-trip journey—from painting to cinema and back to painting. To emphasize this connection, I painted these works in the same dimensions as the originals in the Old National Gallery. In the exhibition, these two paintings will be displayed in the same manner as Friedrich’s works.

Room 3.06 contains other paintings by the German Romantic artist that have also served as inspiration, such as The Lonely Tree and Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon. Through documentation, I gathered cinematic images echoing Friedrich’s works to use as references for my paintings. To emphasize this relationship, I titled my paintings with the same names as Friedrich’s works to which they allude.

There are two pieces in the exhibition that are not landscapes. The first is an interior: Mozart and Van Dyck Afternoons.This painting bears compositional similarities to Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (which also appears in the exhibition), depicting a man standing with his back to the viewer in the center of the frame. However, instead of facing a landscape, he faces a woman playing the piano and a Van Dyck painting. I use this parallel to highlight that the sublime can also be found in art. The second is a close-up of a woman holding a human skull. Although not a still life, I see in this image a Vanitas. While Vanitas are Baroque in origin, this reminder of death is deeply present in Friedrich’s work and Romanticism as a whole, which is why I decided to include it in the exhibition.

The title of the exhibition, Painting at the Service of  Clouds, comes from the Victorian critic John Ruskin, who in his book Modern Painters referred to Romantic landscape painters—particularly Turner—by stating:

“If a general and characteristic name were needed for modern landscape art, none better could be invented than ‘the service of clouds.’”