Through photography, painting, sculpture, installations and videos, thirteen international artists of the last generation from Europe, the United States and Asia reflect on the precise moment in which images reveal themselves as obvious constructions and manifest illusions.
Digital technologies for producing images subject today’s visual landscape to constant transformation. On the one hand, an ever greater number of tools enables us to manipulate images and circulate them while, on the other, our perception of reality seems to have expanded its parameters: in front of digitally-created images our awareness of their artificial nature does not prevent us from appreciating and participating in the illusion. Many works oscillate between moments of simulation and ‘manifest’ fiction and moments of credible hyper-realism, through a continuous shifting of expressive media. In the works by Anna Barriball, Frank Benson and Giuseppe
Gabellone, the drawings have a sculpture-like relief, the surfaces mimic spaces and materials, the forms seem poised between two- and three-dimensionality, between being an image and being an object. The categories of realism and abstraction can no longer be seen as being opposed to each other, either in art or in everyday life. Even economics and politics have become increasingly complex and seem to evolve within a language which is just as concrete and abstract. For that reason, Roman Ondák, Pratchaya Phinthong e Carey Young reflect on the areas of economic trade and political action: fluctuations in the value of money, the nature of legal contracts, predictions about the future and political rhetoric are seen as “representation”, conventions, acts of faith and role-play.