In Useless Landscapes, Syd Krochmalny stages encounters between vast geographies, fragments of language, and the shifting scales of human and non-human existence. Glaciers, waves, volcanic eruptions, mountain ranges, pyramids, and cosmic phenomena appear as more than backdrops: they are active agents, carriers of time, and interlocutors in an ongoing conversation about life, desire, and contingency.

Each painting begins from an image—sometimes photographed by the artist during travels, sometimes sourced from other archives—and is overlaid with a phrase drawn from Krochmalny’s own writing. Many of these texts also form part of his songs, creating a porous exchange between music, painting, and poetry. Their direct, arresting phrasing recalls the logic of the meme: short, memorable lines that, when paired with images, trigger new layers of meaning. In this sense, the works operate both within the tradition of conceptual painting and the dynamics of contemporary image-text culture.

The series collapses conventional divisions between nature and culture, subject and object. A tidal wave becomes a self-portrait; a glacier mirrors an orgasm; an alien encounter disrupts human exceptionalism; a cosmic diagram meditates on forces beyond control. In these works, nature is not passive scenery but an active participant—one that speaks, touches, judges, and exceeds us.

Painted across continents—Buenos Aires, New York, Iceland, Egypt, Patagonia—the works refuse a single origin. They unfold from a mesh of journeys, memories, found images, fictional scenarios, musical fragments, and meme-like aphorisms, embodying a planetary scale where the human figure is absent yet deeply implicated.