Alejandro Pintado has been examining and re-working historical depictions of Mexico’s landscape in his paintings for some years. While living and working in London, he turned his attention to the English countryside for this exhibition. These are images of natural landscapes that are immediately familiar but which Pintado is keen to point out are as constructed as anything we find in an urban environment. Sketched in charcoal on raw, unprimed canvas, the scenes, borrowed from 18 century engravings, serve as the support for Pintado’s interventions in brightly coloured acrylic. Pintado seeks to gently pick apart the tangle of social and political layering within the idea of the countryside, and in particular of the picturesque, that grew up in the grounds of aristocratic estates of the era. At this time the natural environment was being re-designed by gardeners like Capability Brown and William Kent, using their clients’ memories and mementoes of the Grand Tour as inspiration. The idea of England, it turns out, owes much to painters like Claude Lorraine who influenced both the creation and the depiction of the landscape of the time. By using the countryside of Gainsborough and Constable as source material, Pintado’s colourful intrusions thus draw our attention to the complex relationship between the physical world and its art historical representation, and the role that both have to play in a notion as nebulous as national identity.

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In the head of Capability Brown, 2011

charcoal and acrylic on raw linen with vinyl extensions

Post Box gallery entrance

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Planned Roughness, 2010

Collage on antique print by Claude Lorraine