Hans Landsaat’s main sources of inspiration over the past years have been his travels in China.

Impressions of overwhelming panorama’s, endless plains and imposing mountain ranges are set down in rapid sketches and, back home in his studio, find a place in graphics, ink drawings and oil paintings.

During the painting process , the landscape as he perceived it can be transformed into fixed motives or forms, such as in the painting “The night, the way, the green mountains” in which the mountains have been reduced to green basic forms that refer to the beauty of the unattainable.

Landsaat’s work is steeped in the consciousness that within the vast existing order of nature and the universe man takes up a negligible space. And he avoids, moreover, any form of romanticism.

Human sentiments are of no concern to the artist in his stylized landscapes, in contrast to the spiritual forces that his experiences of natural phenomena can evoke.

His landscape paintings therefore do not represent situations in which the observer can lose himself in dreams or imagine himself physically.

They do represent, on the other hand, a strongly Chinese Taoïst oriented state of mind.

Han Steenbruggen, Director
Museum Belvédère, Heerenveen, 2012