Chinese Bridges in Landscape

Printed wood

This Artwork featured in Synthetic Landscapes (2017). A Meadow Arts commission.

Pablo Bronstein explores architecture and its history for its ability to inform our identity, behaviours, and social customs. In the Walled Garden, Bronstein has created a major sculptural installation, which plays with concepts of perspectives, solidity and theatricality.

Bridges are an essential part of the language of landscape architecture, especially in the 18c, as illustrated here at Weston with James Paine’s Roman Bridge. A level of exoticism is added by using the Chinoiserie motif, the English idea of Chinese architecture that also runs through the history of landscape design.

Bronstein exaggerates the ornamental value of such bridges by essentially turning them into billboards and reinforces their theatrical role by making visible the support structure. Playing on transparency and solidity, the structure is further confused by the trompe-l’oeil printing effect on the boards themselves, which gets confused with the Chinoiserie fretwork.

The large and small sizes are an obvious perspectival trick with which landscape designers played constantly, but here is shown to deliberately not work. The make-believe effect is then terminally compromised by the absence of a river, showing purpose and effect completely at odds.

Image: Pablo Bronstein, Chinese Bridges in Landscape. Printed wood. Meadow Arts commission 2017.

 

About the artist

Pablo Bronstein

Pablo Bronstein exhibited in Synthetic Landscapes, Weston Park; Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, 2017, commissioned by Meadow Arts.

Image: Pablo Bronstein, Chinese Bridges in Landscape, printed wood, installation view, Synthetic Landscapes, Weston Park; Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, 2017. Image courtesy Meadow Arts.