Erased landscape with figures

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"Erased landscape with figures" is a mixed media on canvas painted in 2021 by German Bel aka Fasim. It measures 200 x 200 cm. This painting is signed and dated on the back. On the back, the artist also indicates the dimensions and the technique used.

A few words about his "Erased landscapes" series:
"The idea of these canvases came to me in waves, first I had another idea in mind, but once transferred to the canvas it was not very gratifying and I thought I had missed the shot, I started two large format canvases with Greek figures, the collages I was making related to the mural experiment I did in Alcoy in the Urban Skills Festival with automatic drawing and collage but in the mural dimension, that old game of the surrealist group headed by André Breton and something more of Paul- Émile Borduas' group 'Les automatiques' and the Dada avant-garde.

Although once painted the figures remained in the studio for a few months without me making the slightest touch, I thought about painting them again because I was not receiving any emotion, no feeling, and so they remained until March 2019, the date of the beginning of the global contagion and also of the definitive appearance of the climate crisis.

Those were quite difficult times for me and for everyone. I live in an area outside the city, in a small town and suddenly I was isolated from the world, with all kinds of problems and inconveniences, unable to leave practically my studio, only with the Internet and all that dire apocalyptic information that was endlessly emerging from the media, which only made everything worse.

After a few months, one day, I don't remember how, I began to paint on the canvases that I had furiously abandoned, and without apparent order I was putting colors until the images almost disappeared, but the colors and the remains of the figures that were left suggested a new discourse to me. I began to perceive that I had been creating a painting that represented or suggested the drama of the loss of natural space, devoured by the cities and their corrosive and implacable advance, sweeping away forests, animals and anything else. I saw clearly the metaphor of the 'erased landscape', that with determination man was destroying the vegetable world, the origin of everything and of all creatures in pursuit of an industry and a market.

Note that a similar phenomenon was also occurring with the phenomenon of exhaustive cleaning and elimination of any sign or graphic manifestation in urban areas, which also erased in some way any 'graphic existence' that human beings had left in their passage through those places, the epic 'i was here'. Everything was destroyed or silenced by some inflexible devouring and censoring god. Yet out of all this experience would come a new natural force, a new impulse that would unite us globally in pursuit of a restoration and a radical change in the way we interacted in the world, because we had definitely changed in this regard. It reminded me of the small pieces that are falling off due to the meteorological effects of rain and the sun of the erased, the previous layers that had been smothered, eradicated, and forming new and whimsical landscapes in their turn.

From these deep metaphorical thoughts came the idea of the series that I titled; 'the erased landscapes'.

One day to finish the canvas I did a few more sequences, very frenetic, with a lot of energy on the canvas, in an act of pure synergy with the world, like an ancestral dance, as if imbued by some natural or cosmic force that pushed me to do it, so the canvas was finished, a new series of paintings emerged from a deep catharsis and a new purification." Germán Bel aka Fasim

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