Contemplative Landscapes — isabeldevos.be

Isabel Devos, like many abstract and informal painters, feeds on an inner search through colors, sometimes recalling the dramatic palette of William Congdom (1912-1998), or Rothko's color field research (1903-1970). Isabel Devos "paints" nature as a feeling or as a memory of her feeling (as in the work "Rock Scales" which uses the technique of printing Wet Collodion on the glass to generate a dark impression).

In so doing she brings her gesture to an extreme synthesis and conveys the concept of infinity into the landscape. The landscape is everywhere. The Belgian artist dismantles the idea of a neoclassical landscape, or to stay in Venice, she does not depict a veduta like Canaletto, an illuminist reproduction, the expression of technical ability. Instead, imagination prevails over observation. The theme of infinity refers by analogy to Giacomo Leopardi's poetics (1798 - 1837), to the homonymous Canto, in whose verses the romantic poetics of nature is condensed: the contrast between the horizon limited by the hedge and the "endless spaces" that the mind can imagine introduces the theme of the evocative power of vision, so frequent in the artistic expression of the romantic age.

Thus in the landscapes contemplated by Isabel Devos, the hedges become walls, and the "endless spaces" become the landscapes she sublimated.

Urbanautica — Landscape and the Sublime

Flottila, 2023

L’eau Passe III, 2011

Rehearsal, 2016

Colorfield, 2016