Into the Forest

The forest is the landscape that encloses you. Unlike the open field or the panoramic vista, the wood shuts out the horizon and replaces it with a vertical world of trunks, filtered light and deep shadow — a place of both shelter and threat. The Barbizon painters, Théodore Rousseau above all, made the forest of Fontainebleau a serious subject in its own right, studying single oaks with a reverence earlier reserved for saints. In Northern art the forest carries fairy-tale dread, the dark wood at the edge of the village. The painter's problem is light: under a canopy, illumination arrives in broken shafts and dappled patches, and the whole picture must be organised around those few places where the sun gets through. Watch the floor of the wood — the path that leads in and disappears, the clearing that promises an opening. The forest painting is about thresholds, about going in, and about the particular hush of a place where the sky has been replaced by leaves.

Curatorial note by Alexander Knigge, Editor, Artifact World Gallery