Landscape of the Heart (Istanbul Cartouche) is part of Terry Flaxton's Cityscape collection. The work is an extension of the artist's innovation of Cinemontage (present on Sedition in his Landscape trilogy) which took place between 2010 and 2018. To make works using Cinemontage, Flaxton took many images of a location and montaged many HD images onto one screen. In his 2019 works Re:Imagining New York and Reimagining Venice, also in the Cityscape collection, Flaxton montaged over 180 HD images onto three screens and then found a process to mount them on one screen.
In 2019 Flaxton went to Istanbul for the first time and was captivated by the city. When he returned home to the UK he created a new cinemontage work but was unhappy that the form did not fully represent his immersive experience in the city because the emotion of the exchange was missing. In response to this, he abstracted all 200 images until they coalesced into a new form of the ‘Cartouche’ (meaning: a carved tablet or drawing representing a scroll with rolled-up ends, used ornamentally or bearing an inscription). In the case of Landscape of the Heart the scroll is the moving image itself. In abstracting these images Flaxton seeks to evoke an emotional response in the viewer that conveys their own perception of the city.
