New York Art Galleries: The Virtual Experience

Art Reviews Tarsila do Amaral’s drawings are among dozens of landscapes of Brazil you can view from home. Ditto with Guanyu Xu’s photo installations. Through April 18 at Mendes Wood DM, Manhattan; mendeswooddm. com.

Lecturing in Buenos Aires two years ago, the novelist J. M. Coetzee — born in South Africa, now a citizen of Australia, and teaching regularly in Argentina — argued that the southern hemisphere has a big problem: Its artists and writers can only win global attention by pleasing “the cultural gatekeepers of the metropoles of the north,” who “decide which stories by the south about itself will be accepted. ” It’s exactly these contesting gazes on the spaces of the south, by colonizers and colonized, that animate a rich exhibition staged by the Brazilian gallery Mendes Wood DM at its New York outpost.

I had the chance to see “Landscapes of the South” in person, and online Mendes Wood offers a dozen installation views of the presentation and images of 23 Brazilian landscapes, spanning four centuries. The earliest is a 1659 view of a convent in Pernambuco by the Dutchman Frans Post, the first landscape painter in the New World. Landscape painting was long an act of colonial mastery — slaves congregate in front of the stolid white abbey, yet the tropical landscape has the same coloring as any view of Delft — whereas, by the early 20th century, Brazilian artists were using landscape to forge a new national identity out of European, African and Indigenous influences. Check out three beautiful biomorphic drawings here by Tarsila do Amaral, the leading artist of Brazil’s interwar avant-garde, whose lumpy cows and spiky cactuses marry folky, vernacular traditions with the imported forms of French experimentalism.

New paintings by young Brazilian artists like Lucas Arruda, the author of a tight and textured jungle scene here, update these landscape traditions for an age of ecological disquiet. I’ve always thought of these Brazilian artists as no more foreign than my neighbors, and when I saw their paintings in person a few weeks ago, I idly wondered if later this year I might hop a cheap flight to São Paulo. Now housebound, flicking online, I have rediscovered the meaning of distance, ruing how far I am from southern climes.

“JASON FARAGO Through May 2 at Yancey Richardson, Manhattan; yanceyrichardson.”