There is a disquieting calm to Dead Horse, an intimately-scaled work by British painter Gareth Cadwallader. A snowcapped Alpine mountain range is painted in exquisite, photorealist detail. Rising from velvety green foothills, it meets an almost painfully blue sky scattered with picture-perfect white clouds. A path in the foreground leads to a glacier beyond. Next to the path, amid lush grass and wildflowers, lies a dead horse. The Alps have long held a fascination for artists and writers, particularly the Romantics, as an engine of the sublime: their astounding beauty also engenders a kind of terror, dwarfing humankind in the face of nature’s might and magnitude. With the unnerving, unexplained insertion of the dead horse, Cadwallader further troubles our relationship to such landscapes, hinting at some narrative outside the picture, beyond our understanding or control. ‘When I think of “romantic” artwork,’ says Cadwallader, ‘I think of artists like Caspar David Friedrich, Eugène Delacroix or Géricault; artists whose work is characterised by very dramatic, emotional subject matter. I think of my own work as being more understated than that’.
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