Hyperreality (art)

As a relatively new school of painting, hyperrealism is a recognized outgrowth of the school of photorealism. Through convincing photographic imagery, hyperrealist painters routinely create a two-dimensional simulation of a three-dimensional reality. Hyperreal paintings are convincing illusions of reality based upon photographic images which attempt to represent reality. Hyperrealists or hyperreal painters include Jacques Bodin, Denis Peterson and Steve Mills.

Overview

Early 21st century Hyperrealism was founded upon the aesthetic principles of Photorealism. American Photorealist painter Denis Peterson, whose pioneering hyperrealist works are universally viewed as an offshoot movement of Photorealism, first used the term [1] "Hyperrealism" to apply to the new movement and its splinter group of artists. [2][1][3] Graham Thompson wrote "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs."[1]

Hyperrealism is contrasted with the similarly literal, photorealistic style found in photorealist paintings of the late 20th century. Photorealist painters tended to imitate photographic images, often working very systematically and consciously omitting details. The photorealist style is tight and precise, with a mechanical look, and an emphasis on mundane everyday imagery; whereas, the hyperrealist style tends to be more literal as to detail and its emphasis, rather than avoidance of, photographic anomalies, including digital fractalization, image degradation and subtractive vs additive color creation, i.e. CMYK versus RGB color wheels. As such, it incorporates and often capitalizes upon photographic limitations such as depth of field, perspective and focus to create a new hyperreality.

Both schools of art utilize mechanical means of transferring images to the canvas in some way, including thorough preliminary drawings, or underpaintings. Photographic slide projections onto canvases techniques such as gridding may also be used to preserve accuracy. Both styles require a high level of technical prowess and virtuosity to simulate; however, despite their similarities, the two styles are distinctly apart from one another.

As a relatively young art movement, hyperrealism transcends mere double-take illusionism to incorporate iconographic imagery of phenonenological spatial representations and lighting. Extreme detail and ethereal lighting effects are often added to create an appearance of reality, as opposed to a mere photographic simulation. Certain of these hyperreal painters have incorporated profound social, cultural and political themes as an extension of the simulchra; a stark departure from the school of photorealism. Hyperreal paintings are a literal imitation of living reality as distinguished from the particular photograph or photographs used. This frame of reference is considered by hyperrealists to be an artificial representation of an image captured in time and as a process tool of art to further the painted illusion of hyperreality as a representation of a representation.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Thompson, Graham, American Culture in the 1980s, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 77–79.
  2. ↑ Jean-Pierre Criqui, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn interview, Artforum International, June 1, 2003
  3. ↑ Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective by Michael Auping, Janet Bishop, Charles Ray, and Jonathan Weinberg. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA (2005). ISBN 978-0-520-24543-3.
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