I first met Ronnie Landfield in New York before his debut at David Whitney’s new gallery on Park Avenue South. That must have been 1968 or 1969.

As is often the case with substantive artists, Landfield’s area of interest — one of abstraction with a landscape orientation — was already squarely set in its course. That course clearly carries through twenty years to this day.

Although it is not my intention in this statement to engage in critical analysis of Landfield’s art or trace its development, I do have a thought that hopefully will benefit the visitor to his upcoming exhibition at the Linda Farris Gallery in Seattle.

Ronnie Landfield paints abstracted landscapes. Landscapes that are not motifs painted directly from nature but are rather invented to meet his needs as an artist. His paintings are part of a tradition of invented landscapes that goes back to the 15th century in Italy.

The Albertian invention of perspective led artists to invent deep space landscapes such as the related versions of “The Agony in the Garden” by Giovanni Bellini and Andrea Mantegna which we encounter when we visit The National Gallery in London.

Leonardo’s fantastic landscape backgrounds and Giorgione’s mystic vistas are the highlight of this tradition at the turn of the century.

There is a special infusion of energy into tradition from the north through Durer in the early part of the 16th century, and again through Adam Elshimer a hundred years later. By the 17th century this genre was in full swing both south and north of the Alps, with the likes of Domenichino, Claude Larrain, Poussin, Seghers, Rembrandt and Ruisdael, to name only a few.

By the 19th century the great English painters, Constable and Turner, the Germans, Friedrich and Dahl and the French, from Corot to Courbet, made their contribution. As do the great Americans, Inness and Ryder and the much underrated Italian, Macchiaioli. Through the end of the century and the beginning of the next we have Van Gogh, Hodler, Cezanne and Mondrian, followed by Braque, Matisse, Vuillard, Bonnard and Nolde. On this side of the Atlantic we had Hartley, Dove, O’Keeffe and Avery painting in this tradition.

The list is long — and I have left out many great artists. However my inclusions should impress upon the reader that all the artists mentioned above have tapped a deep psychological wellspring with their landscapes. Regardless of their time and the movements to which they have been assigned by the art writers, and regardless of their personal styles or the theories that had been purported to dictate their painting, each and every one strikes this psychological chord that is so basic, that I suggest its origin is locatable in the very creation and development of the eye. Which, after all accounts, seems to have taken place in the landscape, on this planet, over the last eight to ten million years. Therefore, the fact that our attraction to the landscape — and the rendering of that landscape — exists on such a basic level should come as little surprise.

What is a surprise to me is that the great preponderance of art writing in modern times has disregarded the visual enterprise — both the making and the viewing of art — as a psychological one. Rather the writers of art have, by and large, regarded the enterprise to be a verbal one. Criticism offered by the philosophers of art seem to act out some semantic need — a need to put art and the entire framework for art in terms of language or some language system.

This comes as a surprise to me because art seems to be clearly visual, non-verbal and asemantic. The power of the visual is found in the fact that great truths can be communicated without language, or language systems, by and to individuals, without those individuals needing language skills.

After all, the eye developed as an incredibly complex sensing device over the last ten million years — long before the invention of language.

What does all this have to do with an artist such as Ronnie Landfield?

Briefly, let us see.

Landfield arrived on the scene in the heyday of post painterly abstraction. Greenbergian criticism, which held sway at that time, seems to be based on the belief that art is self informed. Painting’s physical aspects as an object, its shape and support, combine with its formal aspects, its flatness and color, to form both the art and the subject of the art.

For Landfield, and other artists whose work was judged by this criteria, this often meant a more or less flawed reading when psychological insights would have been more appropriate considering the origins of his painting.

By the 1970s we had the rehabilitation of Marcel Duchamp, conceptual and process art, and the much heralded death of painting. The emergence of the great semiotic critics Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss ushered in an era where language signified the triumph of the idea over the eye.

This was hardly the milieu to engage the serious painter in a critical dialogue as the critics of the 1970s failed to do.

Landfield and the other serious painters (and there are at least two dozen or more) who prevailed through the wall of indifference and neglect of the 1970s faired little better in the 1980s, when fashion and fashion marketing techniques became partners with the Neo Marxist social thinkers such as Baudrillard. For some, mainly the adherents to the Neo-Geo, this combination forged a belief system where it is hard to separate the jargon of the social thinkers from a marketing pitch that claimed that creativity in the arts is a myth and that art is no more than a commodity object that is traded — thereby reallocating capital in the postindustrial world. These people claim that the artist no longer exists as a thinkable possibility — therefore implying that the viewer no longer exists. In short they are saying that art is not a visual enterprise, but rather an ingredient in a model of capitalism.

Again we have an unhappy climate for the serious painter.

Where does this put Ronnie Landfield as a substantive artist in 1988?

Happily, I believe, he and other painters like him are not in bad shape. These artists who have been steadily working over the last two decades continue to paint. They make art as part of a visual enterprise, an enterprise involving the artist, his intentions and the receptive viewer.

The power of his art is that his intentions are accessible to the viewer through the eye as a sensing device rather than through any restrictive arbitration by a language system. The viewer is then part of this visual-psychological enterprise, which is basically asemantic.

A fact that the visitor to the Ronnie Landfield exhibition will do well to keep in mind as they enter the gallery.

Nicholas Wilder

New York City

March 1988