Obrazy Albionu. Pejzaże Paula Collinsona i Geda Quinna jako „teksty” o współczesnej kulturze

The main subject of the present article is the metaphoric, iconographically complex and formally sophisticated landscapes by two contemporary English painters: Paul Collinson and Ged Quinn. The starting point of the discussion is the category of Englishness analyzed in its time by inter alia Nikolaus Pevsner. Most importantly, the pictures discussed in the study, which are outside of the mainstream of now fashionable solutions, can be interpreted as symptomatic of post-imperial culture tired of the orders of great ideologies. Both Collinson’s hyperrealistic canvases reproducing the “microcosms” of intricately constructed diaporamas, and Quinn’s pictures polished in the glazing technique, which contain subtle references to Jacob Ruisdael, Claude Lorrain, or Caspar David Friedrich, are in a sense political “texts” or even “manifestos”. What can be discerned in them is the expression of strong Kulturpessimismus, the refl ection of a more and more condensed mixture of disillusionment and anxiety in our culture.