Aardbei Landschap (Strawberry Landscape)

A single strawberry, the kind of jewel-like fruit Dutch painters have rendered for four centuries, blown up to the size of a whole landscape and capped with snow. There is an old thread here: in Netherlandish art the strawberry stood for fleeting earthly pleasure, so much so that Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights was once nicknamed the strawberry painting. Wiedijk takes that small symbol of sweetness-that-doesn't-last and inflates it to the horizon, then frosts it with cold. The most tempting fruit in the world becomes an endless, freezing field, and paradise tips quietly over into the absurd.