In a society marked by increasing mobility and dwindling social bonds, intimacy and security have become a new yearning. Inundated with bad news and images of terror, people have begun to long for places of security and redemptive perspectives. This situation is also reflected in the visual arts. Following the analytic explorations of discourse of the 1980s and 1990s and the conversion of art into a social act, it is evident there is a revival of the traditional work.

A series of highly topical artists like Peter Doig, David Thorpe, Kaye Donachie, and Christopher Orr have picked up a thread of the Romantic spirit: the desire for the paradisiacal, the beautiful, and the fairy-tale. Fathoming this dimension, the artists employ not only painting but the key media of postmodernism like photography, installation, and video.