Daniel Heidkamp's Landscape Art

I love landscape paintings. As little as five years ago, this statement would cause banishment from the art world. I’d be persona non grata thanks to my lowbrow taste in painted matter, but that’s ok with me. Given the choice of looking at a quality landscape or a dizzying de Kooning (whose work I happen to love), I’d choose the former if I weren’t in an introspective or zany mood. I’d especially choose the former if the landscape in question is painted by Daniel Heidkamp.

Heidkamp is part of a group of painters (including Duncan Hannah and Cynthia Daignault) that are making landscapes great again.  He’s had three shows in New York this summer: One at the Half Gallery, one a joint project with Daignault as part of the Met’s Talking Pictures exhibition, and his latest exhibition at Pace Prints, Paper Cuts, which takes a left turn into the world of collage.

Shifting mediums presents an opportunity for Heidkamp to saturate his already vivid palette. In Paper Cuts, the colors of the sky, buildings and nature are surreal. Heidkamp introduces neon into his oeuvre for the show without making it look like a gaudy ‘80s disaster or — even worse — inspired by Riff-Raff. This is possible because he uses rich anchor tones to ground each collage, and his blues and violets mellow out their punchier colors

Surrealistic palette aside, Heidkamp’s collages are difficult to distinguish from his painted landscapes. Until I observed one up close, I mistook it for a painting. The lines and shapes in the collages are pieced together with an exacting precision that will likely trick other viewers as well, demonstrating Heidkamp’s consistency across different mediums and his complete conviction in style. He knows his voice and he owns it.

While Heidkamp’s painted landscapes are serene, if not slightly isolating, his collages reflect society’s current entropy without verging on dystopia. Whether it’s his trilogy of trippy New York skyscrapers or a pasted-together variation of a classic New England beach house scene (with neon green grass and aquamarine water), there’s a grounding realistic quality to these scenes — which are otherwise outside the realm of reality. This is the new wave of landscape art, where works go beyond surface value and depict the coexistence of chaos and calm in this crazy little thing we call life. With his ability to transform his landscapes into collages that are at once surreal and grounded, Heidkamp leads the way.