Plein Air, French for open-air, is a well-known term in the art history of painting alfresco. The Macchiaioli and French Impressionist painting styles in open air allowed artists to capture natural light in real, physical time.
In my outdoors exhibition, Plein Air, I wanted to experiment with presenting studio work created for an architecture space in the context of rural Tuscan environments; the same landscapes immortalized in numerous Macchiaioli paintings of the late 1800s.
The encounter was an essential experiential focus for my ideas. Coming across or stumbling upon an artwork differs from viewing outdoor artworks and monuments. Scale and placement are made distinctly different in function.
Outdoor artworks or monuments impose assertion, while an artwork immersed in the landscape feels nearer to finding a rare butterfly in perfumed spring times.