Japanese artist Masakatsu Kondo presents hyper-real landscape paintings taken from photographs of places of geological significance, for example in Japan, Tasmania and Chile. From the mid-1990s, Masakatsu Kondobegan to produce realistic depictions of mountains. The selected image is enlarged and ‘stretched’ vertically. Through changing the image’s scale and proportions, the mountains appear much higher than in reality, and the viewer is forced to question the assumptions that we bring to bear upon the image. More recent paintings have depicted other landscapes including deserts and forests. In these, Masakatsu Kondo has used colour rather than scale as a device to manipulate the viewer’s perception of the image. The images are produced in a flat manner that could almost be an abstract painting, while the realistic nature of photography is maintained.
Source: Cornerhouse