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 hide the cultural representations that support its functioning. Following Roland Barthes, one could see that realism always responds to a system of conventions that would precede the configuration of any image, so that realism does not copy reality but copies, a copy. When we walk through the countryside and think that a certain extension of land is a landscape, we are falling prey to these cultural conventions, because we do not consider any place as a landscape, but one that actually “looks” like a landscape. In this way, what we see is a repetition of an already existing image, which in turn repeats a previous image, which would have another one before it. For this reason, the cultural model of reality that is 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.
