The boundary between the physical and the virtual is an increasingly porous place. Notions such as scale, dimension or measurement that used to define space in an allegedly objective way are currently overwhelmed and it is urgent to find a new definition, a laxer one, of the concept of experience, i.e., a way of defining places that is not so dependent on the separation between reality and fiction that has always conditioned image.
Following the scientific and technical development of the XIXth century, when industrial innovation claimed a place beside art and leisure, successive animation techniques were developed, such as cartoons, silhouettes, stop motion, rotoscoping, graphic design or computer aided 3D that changed our relationship with time and space.
Today it is possible to combine real-world elements with elements designed from the absolute immateriality of a computer. This operation of turning the material into immaterial and vice versa, that our perception understands as a natural extension of the real, or as the opening of a mental space that despite its virtual nature, has a body.
Animation amplifies some experiments that started in the Renaissance and has become the keystone of a flourishing industry that has made video games a mass phenomenon that once was cinema. Thus, the use of projective geometry by XIV century painters marks a series of milestones in the building of an illusory space. Painting, today the screen, has played over the centuries with the idea of deceiving our eyes to eventually show the movement, as we can see, for example, in the seminal Nu descendant un escalier (1912) by Marcel Duchamp.
The works included in this exhibition are not aimed to be any sort of anthology, even though they swing around two historic pieces that mark two pioneering moments in the development of animation. The idea, on the contrary, is to explore how illusion and space relate when time becomes flexible and subjective. The Space of Illusion aims to show the versatility of a set of techniques in order to provide alternative answers, and even contradictory ones, to personal space configurations that are ultimately able to trigger some changes in the experience that, in principle, were supposed to belong only to time.
Curator: Alfredo Aracil
Artists: Misha Bies Golas, Cristina Busto, Fernando Gutiérrez, Joe Hamilton, Emmanuel Lefrant, Mario M. Martínez, LotteReiniger, Natalia Stuyk, James Whitney
- Video presentation of the exhibition [+]
