Landscape is perhaps one of the artistic genres that most skillfully represses its cultural and political components. Under the premise that it simply records "a place in the world," landscape tends to obscure the cultural representations that underpin its functioning. Following Roland Barthes, one could see that realism always responds to a system of conventions that precede the configuration of any image, so realism doesn't copy reality but rather copies a copy. When, while walking through the countryside, we think of a certain expanse of land as a landscape, we are falling prey to those cultural conventions, because we don't consider just any place as a landscape, but rather one that actually "looks" like a landscape. Thus, what we see is a repetition of an existing image, which in turn repeats a previous image, which would have had yet another before it. For this reason, the cultural model of reality perpetuated when "landscapes" are "painted" is doubly colonial, because both the means and the end respond to the foundations of a culture that became hegemonic due to the effects of colonialism.
