28 Sep 2015

]a[ academy of fine arts vienna | Revers de Trompe

Opening | 01.10.2015, 7.00 p.m.
Exhibition dates | 02.10. - 08.11.2015
Venue | xhibit of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna

Artists: Franz Bergmüller, Marcin Dudek, Judith Fegerl, Erich Gruber, Doris Theres Hofer, Stefan Klampfer, Kris Lemsalu, Philips Angel van Middelburg, Nicole Miltner, Domenico Mühle, Raimund Pleschberger, Markus Proschek, Almut Rink, Hans Schabus, Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch, Siegfried Zaworka

Curator: Siegfried Zaworka

In cooperation with the Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

The historical term 'trompe l'oeil' is frequently understood as an absolute deception of the eye (to the most possible degree)—as if the indicator of its success were a complete spiriting away of the art context. This despite the fact that its appeal lies in the very knowledge of how to fathom the potential of representation, in the cross-border use of media, or in the exchange and interaction of pictorial realities and levels of meaning.

The hypersimulation of trompe l'oeil—which, according to Jean Baudrillard, makes for too close a resemblance between representation and represented, challenging the reality-shaping principle of the third dimension and its method of construction in the picture—once undermined the conventions of hierarchic figurativeness and the stately spaces of the Renaissance period. Baudrillard attributes to the pictorial elements of trompe l'oeil a 'fantastic vivacity,' comparable to what children experience upon discovering their own image, and finds them to be part of 'an unmediated hallucination anterior to the perceptual order.'*

Inverted and reverse perspectives insinuate to viewers that they themselves are being targeted by something unfolding out of the core of the work—an inversion of spatial depth culminating in the perception of one's own body as the vanishing point of perspective lines.

Aside from equalizing high and low art through a range of motifs from everyday objects to subject matter previously not considered picture-worthy, which makes it part of a self-reflective contemplation of the conventions of art practice, art activity itself, with its production process and craft basis, occasionally becomes its own subject matter.

Revers de Trompe juxtaposes works that reference the formal repertoire of trompe l'oeil with others which are not categorizable at first sight as continuing the art practice implicit in historical trompe l'oeil. Illusionist attempts within specific fields such as painting, sculpture, and tapestry are pushing their boundaries hard, while kinetic objects come to be suspended in time and the represented combines with the imagined and the ostensibly real in instances of multistable perception. However, what all contributions to the exhibition have in common is the active planning, punctuated with surprise moments, of their self-generated modes of reception. In the structural relations that they establish between viewers, artwork, and space, they reference those pictorial ideas which, as trompe l'oeil, brought down the divide between art and non-art, picture and non-picture—but always with wink and a smile.

* Baudrillard, Jean, Seduction, transl. by Brian Singer, London: Macmillan, 1990, p. 62.

Further Information
www.akbild.ac.at/resolveuid/8e3967ce42b727e6f17574fc9f0d01ee

Program
www.akbild.ac.at/resolveuid/b53abfaeaa16cbefd94a5204862c9e25