Consulate General of Argentine Art Gallery, New York

The title ’From a Sparrow’s Nest’ pays homage to the famous Argentine song ’Ballad for a Madman’ and to its authors, the poet Horacio Ferrer and the composer Astor Piazzolla. ’I look at Buenos Aires’, goes one line, ’from a sparrow’s nest...’.

That look ’from above’ is at the heart of Adrian Doura’s series of urban landscapes. In it, the painter relies on two compositional principles dear to the Enlightenment: the cavalier perspective (or projection) and the bird’s-eye view. The former refers to the view one would have from a horse, a ’high,’ ’frontal’ view. The second places an observer even higher, above objects, like a flying bird. The term thus refers to views of cities mapped from an elevation, particularly in the Netherlands.

The series also establishes Doura’s lineage with the veduta ideata of the Renaissance, a perspective explored, in fact, as early as Giotto’s frescoes. Canaletto, famous for panoramas of his native Venice, is a major representative of this current in the eighteenth century. When confronting a landscape, the Venetian did not hesitate to modify the perspectives, widening the field of vision, removing some buildings, setting backgrounds further back and lifting the point of view as if it came from a very high facing balcony. Thus, his paintings do not faithfully show the real but rather an ’ideal view’.

Doura carries on this tradition by ’composing’ his own landscape out of many photographs of Buenos Aires taken from the terraces of its skyscrapers and reorganized through drawings. By working on these views, Doura has created a distortion of perspective, mingling on the same canvas the horizon which can open in a wide 180-degree panorama and a first quasi-vertical ground. This is the ’sparrow’s point of view.’

In addition to the dizzying beauty of the views chosen, this series shows the painter reflecting on solutions to the spatial problems a given site poses. This reflection on space includes, for Doura, how to exhibit the paintings, their ’installation.’ The entire series fits into the library room of the Argentine Consulate in New York (for which the paintings were designed). Each painting format fits exactly into the woodwork moldings. The canvases are hung so that the horizon or ’skyline’ (the line of contact of buildings with the sky) travels around the four walls at the same height (except for the painting placed over the mantelpiece). As the viewer enters the room, he is immediately surrounded by open views of the city, with the feeling of ’floating’ in the midst of a panoramic cityscape.

Visitors familiar with the city the painter depicts will recognize, in the center of the painting entitled ’Rural 1’ (hung to the left of the fireplace), a wink from him to the exhibition site: the U.S. Consulate in Buenos Aires !

Text written by Adrian Doura and Florence Mottot

Skyline

A film created by Jean-Christophe Tarot
September 2006

Work in progress

Directed by Jean-Christophe Tarot
September 2006