Before a landscape painting, we ask ourselves, “Looking at this, what do I feel?” This question is inherited from the traditional manner of contemplating a painting, but it also comes to us from the culturally determined manner of experiencing a landscape—that is, under the aegis of such philosophical categories as the sublime.

On first seeing Antonio Murado’s recent landscape paintings, I asked myself, rather, “Where have I had this feeling before?” Images of real, filmic, and pictorial landscapes ran through my mind, many of them similar to those that in childhood were nurtured by reading