Dimitri Kozyrev's The Lost Landscapes - Reviewed by Colin Gardner (LA Times)
Dimitri Kozyrev's new paintings leave the freeways and back roads of the Western United States that his previous works toured for more vertiginous trips on the information superhighway. His new paintings on canvas take viewers around the world as fast as a computer can download images.
Kozyrev is a landscape painter who has changed what landscape painting is. If Julie Mehretu paints globalization, Dmitri Kozyrev paints the movement that makes globalization possible.
Americans experience the fruited plain (or the fruited subdivision) at 75 miles per hour. Sometimes we fly over it at six times that speed. So that's how Kozyrev paints it. Each canvas is made up overlapping planes of color. Among them are distant horizons, some sunny, some cloudy, some dotted with buildings, some not. Strips of road -- or maybe runway – run through the paintings, appearing to be going somewhere in the distance. Strangely, you can follow them from the inside of the paintings into the foreground, but as they get closer to the viewer they dissolve. Other landscape elements sit amongst the planes: flat farm buildings, smokestacks, freeway overpasses, onramps, valleys, rock outcroppings.
American landscape painting has long been about stasis, about sitting and enjoying a pretty scene. Americans do not sit and look at pretty scenes anymore.
