Blow-Up — Alberta Pane Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 30 → December 20, 2010

Alberta Pane Gallery presents “Blow-Up,” a group exhibition that brings together international artists Eleonora Aguiari, Igor Eškinja, and João Vilhena around the common theme of perceptive illusion. The title of the exhibition is a reference to the film by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni that relates the loss of marks of a photographer confronted by confusion between reality and illusion. Here, the presented works – photographs, installations, and drawings – invite the observer to stimulate their powers of perception while playing with the boundaries of the visible and the invisible.

The photographs of Igor Eškinja evoke three-dimensional installations of the series made in:side. The traced lines of packing tape, taking the form of stacked or adjacent boxes, create the illusion of volume. The void is transformed into an active space of perception that invites the observer to construct something out of nothing. By using spatial parameters with extreme precision, Eškinja creates “reduced atmospheres” of temporary and short-lived nature that exceed the physical aspects of the work and open up the registers of the imperceptible and the imagination.

Contrary to the architectonic perceptions of Eškinja, the trompe-l’oeil drawings of João Vilhena have no relief, or almost. The artist applies himself to the minute reproduction of all sorts of paper (medical prescriptions, restaurant bills, post-its) that are flat motives of excellence. On these spotless reproductions, executed with a care almost " mono obsessive ", barbaric motives (scrawls, tracings, tasks) appear, briefly showing the marks of a game ticket to be scratched or of a pair of intertwined paperclips, while pink post-its “stuck” on Anche l’Occhio Vela la Sua Parte await their notes. Through these curious and absurd drawings, Vilhena looks to call out to the observer, by utilizing the same genre of trompe-l’oeil and by the choice of titles used in communication with the works.

The recent black and white photos and installation of Eleonora Aguiari represent objects in “levitation.” Lines formed by black, red, or silver tape cross throughout the works to join each of the main subjects, which seem as if suspended in time and space. According to Merleau-Ponty, the invisible is not opposed to the visible, but rather it is its continuation, its depth. It is in this sense that one must understand Eleonora’s work, which evokes “the invisible that accompanies us,” as well as “the perception that goes beyond the things we know, or that we control…”

Three artists in the singular universe give us three levels of interpretation of perception. Three-dimensional illusions, trompe-l’oeil, and perception of the invisible reveal the different facets of a complex notion of the apprehending reality. According to Georges Perec, if the perceptive illusion works, it is because we do indeed want to be duped even if “sometimes the strength of illusion is such that we pretend to still feel it under the reality that denies it.”