Rear View, 2010
Extract text Fancis Smets:
Anne Lass and Mårten Lange reject all nostalgia for the world of landscape paintings that is for ever lost to us. In the 1930‘s Hilarion Thans could still write the following about the Genk landscape: ‘Heather. The world just like God created it.’ That can be taken literally. Whoever paints the heather, is painting God. Western theology and philosophy traditionally found a concept for this unbreakable connection: natura naturata. Nature shows order and harmony, which is beauty, to put it briefly. This is presupposing the existence of an active, ordering power, which creates it in its beauty: natura naturans, that is to say God.

Anne Lass (Germany, °1978) and Mårten Lange (Sweden, °1984) are not so much interested in ‘The world just like God created it’, but in a world deserted by God and passed on to humanity, a natura denaturata. Whereas they record the irrevocable end of the natura naturata, they look at the world with different eyes. In their own unique way they still try to extract poetry from a tarnished nature. Without having to stage anything, they translate the well-known into the unknown in their photos.