From the geometric garden to the trails marked by a hiker scoring signs across the mountainside for others to replicate his footsteps, landscape has long been understood not simply as nature, but as a cultural construct. Every depiction of nature constitutes an act of naming, domesticating, and idealizing it. In this almost instinctive drive to impose order upon chaos, humankind transforms terrain into representation, and representation into memory or longing. In The Finest Hour in Arcadia, Carlos H. Matos stages a reinterpretation of the pastoral through sculptural layering—one that lies far from Virgil’s ideal.
