Back to the sublime

Martin Greenland: Arrangements of Memory
Art Space Gallery, 84 St Peter’s Street, London N1, until 10 October

‘In Painting there must be something Great and Extraordinary to surprise, please and instruct, which is what we call the grand Gusto. ’Tis by this that ordinary things are made beautiful and the beautiful sublime and wonderful,’ wrote Roger de Piles in his Art of Painting, translated into English in 1706, extending the notion of the sublime from literature to painting and opening the road to Romanticism. Martin Greenland’s large, skilful, traditionally painterly landscapes bring us smack back from what Reynolds called ‘the little elegancies of art’ to the sublime. Andrew Lambirth’s persuasive introduction to the catalogue finds touches of Courbet, Corot and the Barbizon painters, also of Russian and American 19th-century landscapists such as Levitan and Frederic Church, but even Claude and Poussin peep out too. Greenland is a bold and ambitious artist using the past to rediscover and repossess the natural world of our own time, and he fully deserved the first prize he won in the John Moores exhibition of 2006.

These mostly wild landscapes, with broken, rocky foregrounds, narrow streams, sudden waterfalls and mountain ridges across the skyline, are evidently those of Cumbria, where Greenland lives, but you could not pin them down quite as you might Cézanne’s Mont St Victoire or Bibémus Quarry. They are creations of the artist’s imagination, stimulated in the first place by vistas and motifs seen during his walks by day and night, assisted by sketches which he then puts aside, but constructed finally almost in the way a novelist might transform memories into fictional scenery. In ‘Primitive Landscape’, for example, the eye is carried up from a dark chasm, by way of a waterfall, to a brilliantly lit pathway between quarried rock faces surrounded by outcrops of tufty vegetation, and across a dark, scarcely visible, foreshortened valley to a line of dark-blue hills under a clouded sky.