studio am

In this Autumn’s Tate Etc. magazine, Michael Diers wrote an interesting article ‘Can you believe it?’ on the practice of trompe l’oeil. One of the illustrations used in his essay is the artwork ‘Clearings’ by Thomas Demand, which was on display at the Venice Biennale in 2003.
On the 2nd of November, I am going to a talk in which Demand takes part  - Architecture+Art: Crossover and Collaboration, organised by the Architecture Foundation - and was intrigued to find out more about his work.

See a photo of ‘Clearage’ below, what looks like a photo of foliage superimposed onto real, live foliage is in fact much more complex.

As Diers puts it in his article:

‘In Venice it was hard for the viewer to tell wether this was a decorative windbreak, an anonymous billboard or a work of art. In the end it was only the small label that indicated that it was a new work by Thomas Demand. Now the viewer felt obliged to go back and take a closer look, and suddenly all was revealed. The thousands upon thousands of leaves in the picture had in fact been made from paper, carefully positioned as foliage and only then photographed.’

Imagine, 30 people were working on this piece for three months and used 280,000 pieces of paper, flower wire and rolls of carpet to achieve the natural looking effect.
One assumes initially that photography is used for the faithfull depiction of reality and falls into the trap of visual illusion.
Master of deception!

Let’s see if he turns up ‘live’ at the lecture or if he sends his papier mache alter ego!