Visual Deception

It has happened where I will walk through a room of art and completely miss the point. I could be falling straight into some sort of Dadaist trap where I am over-contemplating over-simplified art when the actual point is to overstep all meaning and mock the foolish scholar. It could be the pristine coolness of the gallery space that purports these highfalutin claims to understand the artist's purpose. It could be the intense silence and the endless amounts of time to meander from painting to sculpture in awe of something seemingly spectacular.

However, the sublimity of the latest exhibit I saw was completely undercut by the unfortunate over-crowding.

The concept was simple yet brilliant. A term heard and understood by many who study art, but never displayed with such a decadent variation of artists and time periods to return to one surrounding core: trompe l'oeil.

From ancient times, a viewer’s visual experience of an art work framed the work as a re-creation of its subject. The use of various styles and techniques in art works to create an image of what is not in fact there is intrinsically linked to visual illusion. Surely the realist expression that seeks to copy nature, developed in western painting, was born from a fundamental search for visual illusion.

16th Century painter Giuseppe Archimboldo was the advertised star of the show. He uniquely created images made from a set of items that appear to be completely different, such as fruit and vegetables to create the portrait of a man. The idea of trick art has existed even before the Renaissance when used in playing with perspective. It has come so far as to reach the other spectrum in advertising where certain ocular scams are created for shock value and a frisky attempt to replicate images from the past. In any case, the exhibit had an excellent array of visually deceptive art that spanned the years and offering the viewer an expansive understanding of trompe l'oeil from generations past and a variety of cultures present.

These deceptive techniques, not necessarily found in the mainstream genres of pictorial arts, became the subject of new focus and attention in 20th century art, a time when such deception developed in surprising and diverse ways. Magritte made pictures that explored the tenuous relationship between image and reality, while Dali revived the double image method in contemporary art.
And then there was M. C. Escher, the print artist who pursued the detailed depiction of optical illusions. With the advances in both photographic and moving image technologies, the visual image environment surrounding art has undergone, and continues to undergo, a dizzyingly fast rate of change. In such a contemporary environment, artists like Jasper Johns have brought to the fore all manner of new expressive tools, often involving the manipulation and transformation of images, and the exposure of the false nature of such images. These and other experiments could be called a new form of visual play for both artist and viewer.

There may only be one downside to this beautifully orchestrated exhibit: the crowd. For some reason, Japanese have an affinity for only the most well-advertising art shows. Judging by the enormity of the line to get inside where another line around the museum floor awaited, there were no more art patrons left in the city. It was almost corruption how long it took to wait, and after being herded in, no one felt the freedom to move around the room to explore. They were so accustomed to the queue, no one knew what to do when there wasn't one.

All impatient gripes aside, visual deception is a virtuoso of artistic elements and was revered as such. And for a challenge, you might need a stealth plan to deceive the masses as you attempt to cut the line. I would go to this exhibit again, but I don't know if my soul can justify the wait.