TOPOGRAPHY OF LANDSCAPE — MEMORIES

From the moment of our birth until the end of our lives, we continuously accumulate landscapes within ourselves. Some are places we have inhabited, visited, touched, or imagined; others exist only as fragments of images, sensations, ideas, or metaphors. There are also landscapes that seem to precede our individual experience — fragments of a collective memory, archetypal visions of nature, or inherited impressions of forests, mountains, seas, fields, and horizons.

These landscapes do not remain still. They become part of an inner archive, preserved somewhere between consciousness and subconsciousness. At unexpected moments, they return: a colour, a texture, a smell, a particular light, or the memory of a place can suddenly open a passage into something that seemed forgotten. What we remember is rarely the landscape itself. Rather, it is an emotional residue — a constellation of sensations, fragments, and associations. Memory does not preserve reality intact; it continuously transforms it.

This raises a question that lies at the centre of my work: under what conditions does a landscape become meaningful enough to return to us? And when it returns, are we remembering a place, or are we remembering ourselves in relation to that place?

Human existence is inseparable from the natural world. Nature is not simply the environment surrounding us; it is the condition from which we emerged and upon which our existence continues to depend. Yet modern life increasingly creates distance between human beings and the natural environments that sustain us. This separation can produce a profound sense of absence, making us more aware of what nature means to us precisely when we are removed from it.

During the months of lockdown, when I was confined largely to my apartment and physically distant from natural environments, I experienced this separation with unusual intensity. The absence of nature made its presence more powerful. What had previously seemed ordinary suddenly became essential: the openness of a horizon, the texture of stone, the movement of water, the density of trees, the smell of soil. In the absence of direct experience, memories of landscapes began to surface. Images, colours, sensations, and even smells invaded my thoughts, as if an interrupted thread were slowly being restored.

This experience led me to reflect on the persistent presence of nature throughout the history of art. Why have human beings repeatedly attempted to preserve, reproduce, transform, and immortalise landscapes through art? Perhaps because the landscape is never merely external. It is also a mirror of our inner condition — a space where memory, longing, belonging, loss, and imagination intersect.

The Topography of Landscape-Memories emerged from this reflection. The project explores a hybrid space between landscape painting and abstraction, but reverses the conventional movement from representation toward abstraction. Rather than dissolving an existing landscape into abstraction, I begin with abstract compositions that gradually evoke the sensation of landscape. The paintings do not seek to depict particular places. They attempt instead to reconstruct the way landscapes exist within memory.

Each work is composed of overlapping fragments of remembered or imagined environments. These fragments are not arranged chronologically, geographically, or according to any coherent narrative. They exist in a deliberately unstable relationship, as memories do. A mountain may coexist with the sea; a forest may merge with a field; a rock may become a colour or a texture rather than an identifiable object. The logic is not that of an archive but of recollection — fragmentary, associative, fluid, and constantly changing.

In this sense, the paintings function as abstract collages of memory and, simultaneously, as a kind of artistic topography. They map not the physical surface of a particular landscape, but the psychological terrain through which the landscape is remembered. Layers of colour and form become traces of places that may have existed, may have been imagined, or may exist somewhere between the two.

The work therefore inhabits the uncertain territory between remembering and inventing. It asks whether a remembered landscape can still be called a landscape when its physical coordinates have disappeared, and whether an imagined landscape might become just as real through memory. The paintings are not attempts to restore lost places. They are attempts to understand what remains of a place after it has passed through the human mind.

Ultimately, The Topography of Landscape-Memories considers landscape as an internal phenomenon: a continually shifting territory where nature, memory, imagination, and identity meet. These paintings are fragments of that territory — places that no longer need to exist outside us because, through memory, they have become part of the geography within.