My most recent body of work focuses on the development of landscape painting and the evolving notion of the landscape itself. As the idea of space is central to any investigation into the landscape, one is immediately confronted with the infinite - its endless extension and its unknowable nature. To negotiate this immense problem I use the scientific grid of Euclidean Geometry as a base from which to build a schematic representation of space that extends toward the infinite; a kind of romantic sublime that deposits the natural environment as an artifice or screen onto which we project ourselves.
The schism between the natural environment and mankind's increasing urbanization of space is of critical interest to me, for nature is viewed more as an image than ever before. Our subjectified experience of nature is mediated through an interface, a screen, a window, a photograph, a moving image or a viewing platform rather than direct interaction and immersion in it. This means that our environment (space) is primarily experienced as a psychological state, a fragmented reality of layers that exists through representations and mediation as opposed to visceral, lived experience.
The work harnesses various periods of art history and landscape painting from the Italian Renaissance to the present such as the architectural labyrinth's of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's 'Imaginary Prisons', German romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friederich's vision of the sublime, as well as more recent technological landscapes such as the matrix and computer aided design of contemporary architecture.
It may appear ironic, but my work does not use the computer for any part of its design or fabrication. I am quoting the space of the digital realm by simulating its aesthetic, whilst making a declaration for the superiority of its opposite, the handmade! The hand still does it better, there are no pixel losses in a painting, its resolution is more advanced, more hyper-real, more sensual. In this way, the surface of the painting is of equal importance to the landscapes represented.

Peter Daverington, July, 2008