Trains by José Miguel Palacio (detail of ‘Trenes Alstom, serie 100, en estación Puerta de Atocha’), the pictorial nudes by Nadav Kander (‘Michael’) and the monumental Madrid by Paula Varona (detail of ‘Tensión Intangible II’).
In addition to the Thyssen Museum, 3 other exhibitions play with the obsessions, intentions and themes of hyperrealism and aim to deceive the viewer: photography or painting?
Between the warmth of the public and the lukewarmness of the critics, more ‘pop’ than ‘pop art’ and devoted to reflect a superlative reality. Hyperrealism is the ‘sensation’ of the artistic season (with the permission of the exhibition on Dalí, at the Reina Sofia, which has just debuted) thanks to the retrospective exhibition, already a best-seller, that the Thyssen Museum is dedicating to it.
The compulsive and meticulous portrait of the everyday, ‘re-represented’ through paintings that take as a model photographs of reality, gives rise to works that overwhelm by their technical perfection and provoke strangeness by their ‘dehumanization’. The taste for reflection (in bodywork, glass, mirrors) and perspectives so ‘in HD’ that they do not exist (neither for the eye nor for the lens) complete in broad strokes a current that seduces the viewer but that is often singled out for its, supposed or not, lack of intellectual density.
In case the candies of Robert Bernardi, the cars of Don Eddy or the telephone booths of Richard Estes at the Thyssen have not been enough for you, we propose three other appointments with works in which the pictorial and the photographic are confused and that will test your perception.
Album of urban Madrid. If the American masters of this movement, born at the end of the sixties and baptized as ‘photorealism’ by the collector Louis K. Meisel, recreate themselves in the imaginary ‘made in USA’, the exhibition ‘Urban Hyperrealism’ does the same with contemporary Madrid. “I’m interested in everything that happens in a cosmopolitan and global city, its socioeconomic and cultural development, and especially the means of transportation,” explains the artist, José Miguel Palacio, whose obsessions are palpable in the 29 paintings on display. Among them, brushstroke-based snapshots (and thousands of photographs in preparation) of Barajas T4, the Gran Vía ‘trapped’ in the windows of an EMT bus, or the AVE resting at Atocha Station. Ansonera Gallery (Alcalá, 52) until May 25.
The reverse path. From Madrid to Malaga, from urban to intimate portraits and from painting posing as photography to the opposite. At the Museo del Puerto hang the thirteen photographs that make up ‘Inner Condition’, a series of nudes by photographer Nadav Kander that ‘cross-dress’ as canvases for their colors, textures, light and composition.
Moreover, they are born as heirs to a long-standing pictorial debate on the representation of the body: the classical, idealized beauty of artists like Michelangelo versus the realism of Rembrandt’s washerwomen, the prostitutes of contemporary artist Marlene Dumas or the ordinary, imperfect people of her contemporary, Jenny Saville. “I always wanted to photograph nudes that would provoke more than just a basic reaction to a naked figure,” writes the author. The viewer feels exposed, almost like the model, to moments of stark intimacy.
Kander made his mark on the art scene by winning the Prix Pictet ‘Earth’ prize in 2009 for a series on the landscape and social changes taking place on the banks of the Yangtze River in China, and some of his work hangs in the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He can also boast of having portrayed Obama for the cover of The New York Times Magazine. Museo del Puerto (Palmeral de las Sorpresas, pier 2, Malaga).
From sharpness to brushstrokes. Hyperrealism and impressionism not only share the same building (both with exhibitions at the Thyssen, the one devoted to the former until June 9, the latter until May 12), but they are also found, in a way, in the fifty or so works Paula Varona presents under the name of ‘Madrípolis’ at the Casa de Vacas center.
As she explains: “Up close, you can see the brushstrokes, it’s almost an abstract sensation. As you move away, it starts to be a very real image and in the end, you think it could be a photograph”. His paintings are postcards of a monumental Madrid (“the one I like the most because it is the most genuine”) brighter, cleaner, brighter than the real one, with a color palette in which white, gray and pastel tones take all the limelight. Casa de Vacas (Paseo Colombia 1, Madrid). From May 1 to 29.
Enlace: http://www.metropoli.com/arte/2013/04/29/517967b6684341d6420001c7.html
Laura Caso
