Torontonian artist Alex McLeod is transforming landscape art into a futuristic genre. McLeod uses specialized software to digitally construct hyper-realistic 3D environments, which at first glance look like paper cutouts or miniature models which have been dramatically lit and photographed. But the shapes are just a little too impossible, the smooth surfaces and hard edges a little too perfect – or are they?

Currently showing at Galerie Trois Points, McLeod’s exhibition titled Légendes oubliées features candy-coloured vistas of lacy mountains, bulbous clouds, gold-mirrored castles, and glassy rainbows. Complex patterns envelope every nook and cranny. They stretch and fold to create cities, mountains, skies and forests. Artificial and realistic at the same time, the utopian landscapes are like photographs of a dream, and I feel as though touching one of the frames may make the image disappear.

Even more chimerical is the kaleidoscopic video projection in the smaller back room. Dark, bare forests melt into each other, crystalline structures grown and fade, perfectly conical snow-laden spruce trees grow, mirror, and collapse.

Fabulous in every sense of the word, McLeod’s work demonstrates that even when using the most avant-garde digital technology, landscape art has lost none of its romance.

Galerie Trois Points, space 520
Alex McLeod
Légendes oubliées
May 26 – June 23, 2012
www.galerietroispoints.qc.ca