Escapism into breathtaking, surreal landscapes is achieved by a 15kb JavaScript program that creates stratified landforms with the use of hundreds of thousands of color strokes. Matt DesLauriers’ Meridian collection is a stunning array of landscape work achieved in a multidimensional generative space with a multitude of longitudinal possibilities. 

It can scarcely be believed that such transportive topographical art was the product of algorithmic rendering, so elegantly do the strokes form patterns to create the surrealist illusion of mountainscapes, deserts, oceans, etc. Meridian 903 is a burnt sienna color interspersed with peach and white strokes so that the effect is exactly that of soft, smoky desert sand sifting across the canvas, or like the ridged side of the Grand Canyon wall. Meridian 287 is a brighter variety of this same pattern, gold and marbled.

A foggy mountainscape appears in Meridian 150, as charcoal and white strokes create a series of thin white lines that cut skeletally through thicker black masses, like white rivers cutting through the black mountainscape. A similar companion in style is Meridian 266 that seems to carry this image onward as if a piece of the same panoramic view some faraway, smoky mountain topography buried in the river. The monochrome creates a melancholy and stormy mood, and coupled with the almost fur-like strokes, the painting breathes and moves as if it is a living thing. 

Up close one can see all of the strokes, almost like pixels, but when the piece is enlarged or seen from afar, the strokes blend beautifully to create brilliant, mesmerizing, and dreamy topographical landforms that are a new and refreshing kind of surrealist art.