The surrounding landscape, or even the imaginary one, has been a particularly important point of reference for people, given its attributes as a framework where life could unfold or encode meanings. Landscape art generally represents the art that depicts, especially in painting, natural landscapes. With easily recognizable subjects such as forests, trees, mountains, rivers, seas, and oceans—broad vistas or even various types of gardens—the art of depicting landscapes always relies on coherent compositions. Besides paintings where the actual theme is the landscape, there are often landscape elements present in the background of famous portraits or in works where the main subject is not the scenery. 

From the very beginning, paintings on this theme have rendered views of landscapes with varying degrees of precision, imagination often being used to complete, modify, or entirely invent new scenes. That is why, historically, the painted landscape has remained a subject of interest to this day, when, more often than not, the message of an image is strongly amplified by its adjacent elements. 

The Painted Landscape, a Reflection of the World 

The elements that make up a landscape have been, through the brushes of artists around the world, romanticized, poetized, and generally used as metaphors. Going beyond mere decor, the landscape has represented a bridge between humans and the external universe, a staging of emotion, and a mirror of the spirit. If we look at the European canon, from Giorgione to Caspar David Friedrich, nature has represented not only a space for contemplation but also one of the sublime. In the Romantic era, landscapes could be representations of inner turmoil, and forests, mountains, or sea storms reflected restlessness, reverie, or revelation. 

A very interesting aspect of the 17th–18th centuries is the “Claude glass,” an optical device used by artists and travelers to aestheticize reality. Perhaps a precursor to today’s Instagram filters, the Claude glass is a smooth surface that reflects the image, but in darker tones, softening contours and intensifying hues—the effect obtained being strongly idealized. Today, each of us carries such a mirror in our pocket: the mobile phone. On the one hand, its reflective surface is dark, producing the same effect as the 17th-century device; on the other, the digital manipulation of images to create a more “Instagrammable” nature is another form of this effect. Nevertheless, we often forget that we are aestheticizing suffering landscapes and truncating reality—an act that reveals not only a continued tendency to beautify nature but also a detachment from its concrete reality. 

The Climate Crisis in Contemporary Art 

The 21st century will forever be marked as the period of awareness regarding climate crises, and in its traditional way, art plays an active and highly important role in this regard. If, in the past, we could also speak of a decorative function of landscape art, today the landscape is a true platform for confronting ecological reality. Contemporary artists such as Olafur Eliasson or John Gerrard, along with many emerging Romanian artists, use the image of nature not to soothe, but precisely to unsettle. Fires painted in heavy strokes, rivers flowing backward, or abandoned forests are markers of an art of warning. The landscape becomes fragile, threatened, and aesthetics is assumed as a means of visual denunciation. 

These forms of artistic expression propose a new visual ecology in which art commits itself, beyond aesthetic emotion, to an activist direction, aiming to raise the viewer’s awareness. Also functioning as a personification of nature, it suffers, withdraws, and addresses us directly in a call for awareness. Ileana Ștefănescu subtly proposes such a dialogue in the painting Man in the Urban, created in clay and acrylic on paper. The work depicts a rather schematic portrait, without prominent features, dominating an equally schematic block. Through this juxtaposition and exaggeration of scale, the resulting effect is a reevaluation of the relationship we have with the urban spaces we build and, implicitly, manage. Due to our constant activities, these spaces end up governing us and imposing their own policies—often putting us in a position of subjugation through our absolute dependence on their utility. 

Nature as Creative Partner 

More and more artists are abandoning the romantic perspective of nature as an object of representation, opting instead for a partnership with it. This approach involves not only ecological themes but also an ethic of the artistic process, where recyclable materials, natural pigments, reused canvases, or alternative supports are used. Affirming a direct, even intuitive relationship in which ethics becomes inseparable from aesthetics reveals a clear intention to reduce the ecological footprint of art without sacrificing expressiveness—while also translating global issues through particular visions. 

In this sphere of representation, we can also speak of Flora Răducan’s art, which preserves an impressionistic subtlety, with post-impressionist reminiscences from Van Gogh’s brushwork. Her works are allowed to breathe, unconstrained by rigid compositions. Her paintings do not invade but cultivate the space. The immediate effect is a meditative state that reconnects the viewer with nature and with a slower rhythm of things—a time that belongs more to nature itself than to rushed cities. Flora Răducan proposes a slow gaze, one filtered not through Claude mirrors or Instagram, but through her personal expression of nature. Through paintings that seem to have absorbed even the moisture of the evoked scenes, the artist takes landscape painting to another level—between the historical and the contemporary—not through direct eco-art interventions, but through subtle suggestions, naturally awakening the ancestral, human need to (re)turn to nature. 

The painted landscape, once a space for dreaming or retreat, has today become a territory of lucidity and action. From poetic visions to crisis messages, nature transforms into a mirror of our own degradation—but also into a silent ally of regeneration. Contemporary artists no longer seek only the beauty of the view but its truth: vulnerable, torn, but still alive. 

Today, when each of us carries in our pocket a digital mirror reflecting filtered realities and idealized desires, landscape painting reminds us that true seeing is not learned through a filter, but through silence. And in that silence, if we truly draw near, we might hear nature whispering not only what it once was—but also what it could become, if we finally dare to see it. 

Ph.D. Researcher Andrei FĂȘIE