Photorealism [Hyper Realism; Super Realism].

Style of painting, printmaking and sculpture that originated in the USA in the mid-1960s, involving the precise reproduction of a photograph in paint or the mimicking of real objects in sculpture. Its pioneers included the painters Malcolm Morley, Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack (b 1931), Robert Bechtle (b 1932), Robert Cottingham (b 1935), Richard McLean (b 1934), Don Eddy and the English painter John Salt (b 1937), and sculptors such as Duane Hanson and John De Andrea. Though essentially an American movement, it has also had exponents in Europe, such as Franz Gertsch.
 

Hyperrealism

Hyperrealism is an emerging school of painting that grew out of the American school of photorealism. Through counterfeit photographic imagery, hyperrealist painters routinely create a simulated two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional reality. Hyperreal paintings are optically convincing visual illusions of reality based upon reductive photographic images that initially attempt to represent reality. Hyperreal paintings create an almost tangible solidity and physical presence through subtle lighting and shading effects where shapes, forms and areas closest to the forefront of the image can appear beyond the frontal plane of the canvas. Hyperrealist painters include Alicia St. Rose, Pedro Campos, Jacques Bodin, Denis Peterson, Gottfried Helnwein, Gilles Esnault, Istvan Sandorfi, Luciano Ventrone, Latif Maulan, Luding Meng, Glennray Tutor, Suzana Stojanovic, Bert Monroy (hyperrealist digital painter), and Ron Mueck (hyperrealist sculptor).

Certain of these hyperrealists have further incorporated social, cultural and political thematic elements as an extension of a visual illusion; a distinct departure from the school of Photorealism. Denis Peterson, Gottfried Helnwein, and Latif Maulan are three provocative hyperrealist painters who have depicted the political and cultural deviations of societal decadence, its enigmatic imagery, and the aftermath of its tragic, ideological and insane consequences. Thematically, these controversial artists aggressively confront the corrupted human condition through narrative paintings as a phenomenological medium. The paintings are historical commentary on the grotesque mistreatment of human beings.

Peterson’s latest provocative work on human oppressions has focused on diasporas, genocides and refugees around the globe as a political statement through visually disturbing and highly charged images that have recorded an abhorrent period in history that has marked the decadence of the human condition. Helnwein developed unconventionally narrative work centered around past, present and future deviations of the Holocaust and its grotesque darkness. Maulan’s work is primarily a critique of society’s disregard for the helpless, the needy and the disenfranchised. These three hyperrealists have exposed totalitarian regimes and evocatively raised political and moral conflicts with third world military governments through narrative and hyperrealistic depictions of the legacy of hatred and intolerance. Subjects of these iconoclastic artists are often statuesque figures and stoic faces that eerily seem to share an internalized calm in the face of the surrounding horrors of deadly disease, impending torture, terrorizing fear and irrational hatred.

Early 21st century hyperrealism is contrasted with the similarly literal, photorealistic style found in traditional photorealist paintings of the late 20th century. Painters in both schools of art make allowances for some mechanical means of transferring images to the canvas, including preliminary drawings or grisaille underpaintings. Photographic slide projections onto canvases and rudimentary techniques such as gridding may also be used to ensure accuracy. Both styles require a high level of technical prowess and virtuosity to simulate reality; however, despite any apparent similarities, the two styles are distinctly apart from one another.

Photorealist painters tended to systemically imitate photographic images, often consciously omitting pictorial details, human emotion, political value and narrative elements. The photorealistic style of painting is uniquely tight, precise, and mechanical with an emphasis on mundane everyday imagery.

The more recent hyperrealist style tends to be much more literal as to pictorial detail with an emphasis on social, cultural or political themes. This is in stark contrast to the concurrent Photorealism with its avoidance of photographic anomalies including digital fractalization, image degradation, and subtractive versus additive color creation, i.e. CMYK versus RGB color wheels.

As such, hyperrealism incorporates and often capitalizes upon photographic limitations such as depth of field, perspective and range of focus to create a new hyperreality.
 

Art  Now
 

(Artists at the Rise of the New Millennium)