Pleasant Places

Pleasant Places by U.K.–based artist Quayola reimagines the landscapes of Provence that once shaped the artistic language of Vincent van Gogh. More than 125 years after Van Gogh’s time in the region, Quayola returns to the same fields and orchards with a lens not of paint and brush, but of code and computation. Capturing trees and shrubs moved by the mistral winds, the artist translates these natural gestures into algorithmic compositions, where the boundaries between photography, painting, and digital abstraction dissolve.

The work becomes a conversation between past and present, between the sensibility of the painter and the precision of the machine - an exploration of how technology can transform our perception of the natural world without stripping it of its poetry.

Titled after the first series of landscape prints produced in 17th-century Holland, Pleasant Places continues a centuries-old dialogue on how we depict nature. Through the experimental misuse of image-analysis and manipulation algorithms, Quayola investigates what happens when the camera no longer simply captures reality, but reinterprets it.

In his digital landscapes, forms blur and merge - trees, leaves, and light dissolve into dense layers of color and texture, suspended between representation and abstraction. The sound of wind and rustling foliage, likewise, becomes fragmented and distorted, mirroring the visual transformation. In this hybrid space between the pictorial and the computational, Pleasant Places reflects on both the fragility and persistence of vision - inviting us to see not just nature itself, but the evolving systems through which we attempt to understand it.

Quayola, Pleasant Places, 2015, 4K Video, 28’ 12’’