Beaches full of cars, roadside pottery shops, cemeteries surrounded by apartment blocks, abandoned buildings... When Joan Rabascall photographed the north of the Costa Brava in the summer of 1982, the real landscape didn’t quite gel with the idyllic image that postcards and tour operators were peddling. Conceived as a reflection on the idea of landscape, Rabascall’s series Paisatge Costa Brava (Costa Brava Landscape) avoids the usual, clichéd point of view, but rather directs the gaze beyond the picture frame. By printing the word ‘Landscape’ in six languages on the image, as if it were an actual postcard, the artist directly confronts popular customs and mass culture: the idyllic construction made by pictorial landscaping with the devastating consequences of mass tourism.
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