Finest Hour in Arcadia
The geometric splendour of the French garden, though much indebted to the legacy of the Italian giardino, follows a clear Cartesian logic —its symmetry and strict order giving the impression that each fir tree responds to a rational plan. The English garden, on the other hand, is historically organic: it proposes a scenic, freer and more meandering nature, tinged with melancholy. A landscape that echoes Baconian empiricism. Both are mirrors of ideologies. Both are artifice.
The relationship between man and nature has been less about contemplation than construction. Every gaze upon the landscape becomes a symbolic operation where things are named, delimited, and ordered. In the act of representing nature, humans project their nostalgia, fears, and above all, their desires onto it. The garden has long been a privileged stage for this domestication of the wild, but the same principle extends to parks, forests, and any space that holds the potential to become an Arcadian postcard.
In Finest Hour in Arcadia, Carlos H. Matos proposes a landscape where the bucolic and the contemplative are also subjects of study and constant manipulation—an ideal cartography that moves away from Virgil’s pastoral vision. He suggests other ways of inhabiting and altering nature—closer to Juan O’Gorman’s organic virtuosity, Edward James’s reimagined nature, or the obsessive collecting of Sir John Soane—all frequent references in the artist’s work.
The accumulation of overlapping objects, work tables, and other devices suggests the presence of a dweller within this idyllic cluster of islets—a figure driven by a transformative impulse who, in the spirit of the nineteenth century, has turned an archipelago into a cabinet of curiosities. Here, he catalogues and examines the world within his reach, while contemplating, with a blend of wonder, appropriation, and a touch of melancholy, the splendour of his own Arcadia.
Enrique Giner de los Ríos
