Hyperréalisme. Ceci n’est pas un corps.

Hyperréalisme. Ceci n’est pas un corps. : Valter Casotto In the Box extended 2017-18 Silicone, epoxy resin, oil colours each44 x 49,5 x 25    Hyperréalisme. Ceci n’est pas un corps. : John DeAndrea, Dying Gaul, 2010 © John DeAndrea Courtesy of Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris and Institute for Cultural Exchange, Tübingen Photo © clérin-morin photographie    Hyperréalisme. Ceci n’est pas un corps. : Duane Hanson Two Workers 1993 Bronze, polychromed in oil, mixed media, with accessories Figure1 standing: 190 x 167 x 66Figure 2 sitting:130 x 68 x 75ladder arranged:200 x 125 x 59   


The exhibition


It is an understatement to say that the exhibition at the Maillol Museum is surprising. As soon as you enter, you have to acclimatize yourself and there is a risk of confusing the first resin figure, modeled from behind, facing the wall, with a real girl. Once the focus is set - "Phew, this is not a woman! -, one is plunged into the darkness. There, the figures follow one another, disturbing. Thanks to advanced technical processes, the illusion is perfect: human scale, clothes that could be ours, hair and silicone whose texture is similar to flesh and which captures the luminosity, precision of the colorimetric application in the details of the faces or the veins of an arm... The other sections lead elsewhere to confusion, with their formal plays on scale and color - up to monochrome in George Segal's work -, and their fragmentation and deformation of the body. For the verisimilitude of the detail blends with the implausibility of the whole, provoking this feeling of strangeness based on the representation of the ordinary. Human, too human... As for the fact of exhibiting at Maillol a panorama of hyperrealistic works - after stages of the exhibition in Bilbao, Canberra, Rotterdam, Brussels or Lyon -, it proves to be relevant. Indeed, if the purity dear to Maillol anticipated the abstraction in opposition to which the American hyperrealism of Duane Hanson and John DeAndrea was constituted in the 1960s, the sculptor's museum devoted to the representation of the nude is the ideal setting to suggest how much the work of mimesis is still relevant.

Extract from the article by Emma Noyant published in the N°103 of the magazine Art Absolument. Publication on October 14, 2022.

When


08/09/2022 - 05/03/2023
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