If we situate these paintings within the tradition of landscape, this need to experience and inhabit the landscape or, in other words, to produce a work out of contemplation, seems to revive the Romantic idea of the sublime. Within this aesthetic movement, the sublime in creation refers to an extraordinary and wondrous experience, vast and immeasurable in scale, which can only arise from observing nature and landscape.

If beauty comforts and soothes us, the sublime unsettles and moves us. The immensity of what surrounds us seems to reduce us to ephemeral beings in the face of eternity.

And yet, these works bear the title Z·E·N, evoking a Japanese school of Buddhism that seeks, through intense meditative practice, to connect the body to its environment without the mediation of consciousness or reason. In this regard, Roland Barthes explains that this godless religion “appears as a vast practice intended to interrupt language, to break that kind of inner radio that constantly bombards us.”

Landscapes produced under the influence of Zen in Japanese art display a beauty defined by transience, by what is not fixed and cannot be controlled or understood through rational thought; they are boundless floating worlds.

Carolina Fontana’s paintings, in their free form, subtly seek to evoke this indeterminacy through the coexistence of figurative images and abstract forms. They arise from the desire to convey to the viewer this transcendental experience of the landscape. The titles of her recent works (CH Nevado Grindelwald, CH Luzern Punte, CH Luzern Reflejos) function as clues intended to activate this evocation.

This reminiscence, this sense of déjà vu, emerges as the viewer slowly approaches the work and recognizes, within the figurative elements, an image hidden in memory.

This evocation subtly connects us to the eternal intimacy of the landscape.

Manuel Neves, Paris, April 2026