Hyperrealism offers utterly lifelike
paintings that portray the reality almost photographically. It’s uncanny how one cannot tell a photo from a painting, this effect owed to the great mastery of the artists, the mechanics, techniques and the materials selected for the painting.
An artist first takes a picture of the object, then uses diverse mechanical and electromechanic means to transfer the image to the canvas. For instance, he may copy the photo and blow it up to a large-scale image, and then uses the projector and the size grid to outline the image on the canvas, sprays the paint with a spray gun, uses emulsion coating and other materials and applies them the way the individual style of an artist is totally lost. The artist in hyperrealism should be unrecognizable, that’s the peculiarity of the style. In the 20th century the lost interest in masterful representation – indeed, it’s impossible to surpass Shishkin’s forests, so why bother? And they turned to exploring the expressive means. The paintings stopped being “beautiful” and started being “smart”, the world first saw black squares and distorted women with noses somewhere around their ears, and the viewer turned from emotional perception of a canvas to intellectual interpretation to the best of his abilities. Hyperrealism emerged in this complicated context as the means of turning back to representation and finding the new ways the old masters did not have the chance to use. What’s so special about these paintings, how do they differ from photos, considering that the activity of an artist is so much reduced to simple mechanics? The fact is that hyperrealism has a deeper philosophy to cover the mechanical aspect. It’s one of the ways an artist escapes the reality. In this case the destination is not the subconscious, the trandescent world, the abstract plain of the canvas, the romanticized past as we see in expressionism, realism, romanticism, surrealism, classicism ets., but to another world created by hyperrealists – the virtual reality, depicted to the slightest detail, with great mastery but no passion and emotions. It’s a hyperreality that is not subjected to artistic emotion and interpretation, the self-existent reality. Subjects of these paintings are documental to the core – the urban scenes, people, things are depicted with unsurpassed draughtsmanship, which makes the style similar to pop-art.
