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Photorealism paintings in the late 1960s and early 1970s were a reflection of reality based on a photographic genre that became a mainstream school of art following Abstract Expressionism and POP Art. This was not achieved by meticulously duplicating details in a photo. In fact, the illusion was created through tonal changes and inter-relationships of shapes not dissimilar to Abstract Expressionism. Without these elements, the work would have lost its visceral energy. It is no longer enough to just secure the painting as a realist object. Idiosyncratic anomalies in digital reference photos, i.e., multiple depths of field, expanded color range, low resolution images, broken fractals, etc. are all explored. Since the human eye does not ordinarily distinguish these somewhat inchoate mutations, they are freely assimilated into the work. My new work has evolved into a more advanced photographic genre, Hyperrealism - an extreme form of photorealism. It is still photorealism: however, it has progressed by altering the viewer's perception through an illusion of actual reality, as opposed to merely reflecting a representation of reality. Hyperrealism is an optically convincing, altered reality that challenges the verisimilitude of perception and illusion. As a counter culture school of painting, hyperrealism incorporates an existential frame of reference: in the new work, it is POP culture. To some, these paintings appear "just like photos" - they are anything but - more so they are deliberate polymorphic illusions of a non-existent reality.
"One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs. The everyday nature of the subject matter of the paintings likewise worked to secure the painting as a realist object. The photorealist genre, however, is clearly more than just an attempt to replicate the mechanical action of taking a photograph. It also intervened in a debate that is as old as photography itself: to what extent is a photograph simply a reflection of reality, or to what extent does it mediate the reality it is representing? The emphasis in photography falls upon the assembling and constructing, rather than the mechanical taking, of a photograph." (2)
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