The experience fundamental to Cecilia Visser’s works, is that of the hiker walking the narrow path on top of a mountain ridge, left and right of her the abyss of space, or along the cliffs of a rough coastal line, the endless expanses above the ocean at her side. Any hiker knows what Cecilia Vissers knows: vantage points like these change an endlessly detailed landscape into an arrangement of volumes so that even light and atmosphere become as if solid. The illusion that you can touch anything at any distance is paramount. Doing so is dangerous, the sort of danger that makes your fingers tingle, because you can hardly resist the impulse to touch these grand images that unfold around you, so near, so far. Only the weight of your feet prevents you from dissolving into it all.

Memories of the sublime landscapes of Ireland and Scotland with poetic names like Blacksod Bay, Canna, Gaoth, Land’s End, guide Cecilia’s activities in the studio. Halfway between memory and the here-and-now an important role is assigned to her stunning and beautiful photographs that introduce a first phase of abstraction to the artistic process.

In her studio the lines and curves that the body memorised, she now traces around the volumes of steel, aluminium and colour. The contours of the sculptures are as sharp as the footpaths and high walks she laid back. Each contour defining an object should have the significance of standing on firm feet between sky-, rock- and seascapes.

From the landscapes Cecilia loves, she also brings in the combination of the weight of matter and the transparency of atmosphere: matter as in the sheer weight of her sculptures, atmosphere as in their shining colour. Every proportion, every curve in her work is carefully considered and reconsidered, as repeated hikes through a specific landscape shed new light on it every time. It’s the nature of the natural landscape that it never repeats itself. This unfolding is what each of her work asks us to observe, because there’s nothing static about them. Even a square is not a square.

Do the abstract, sturdy and unchangeable shapes of Cecilia Vissers’ works contradict this? No – the tension between figure and ground, circumscribed by the contour of the work, isn’t analytic in character, but synthetic. Each contour is an excitingly vivid presentation of multiple qualities that we associate with landscape: autonomy, completeness, uselessness, beauty, presence. So we are reminded of works by Arp, Matisse, Ellsworth Kelly, Jan Roeland, artists creating abstract contours that never stop to elaborate on their origins in nature and landscape. Here’s to the sublime minimal, or the minimal sublime.