From photographs capturing illicit queer encounters in the cinemas of 1970s Bogotá to a playful reimagining of Luis Barragán’s Mexico City home, an exhibition by Cultish Studio invites us to look beyond the surface of perception
Art and illusion are intimate bedfellows. From the trompe l’oeil trickery of the ancient Greeks and Romans to the apparently undulating Op Art of Bridget Riley et al, to the more recent employment of AI in the service of both imagination and interrogation, artists have invited us again and again to look twice, to question our initial perception. Coinciding with this year’s Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, a timely off-programme exhibition titled Il Faut Le Croire Pour Le Voir (“you have to see it to believe it”) looks at illusion afresh through the lens of nine artists and artist duos whose work renders illusion “a discipline of looking”. Conceived by Cultish Studio – the cultural lab of creative agency Publicis Luxe – the show is curated by Julien Frydman, the founder of rising contemporary art fair Offscreen Paris, in dialogue with the studio’s artistic directors.
The exhibition fills the Galerie des Collatéraux, the former stables of a grand 19th-century mansion, which were later transformed into a gymnasium (it still boasts a swimming pool) and have now been reimagined as a bustling cultural hub. The space is darkened, and the first artworks you encounter by the American artist and photographer James Casebere have been suspended above the pool’s reflective waters. (“We thought it was a playful introduction to the show’s unifying concept,” Frydman tells AnOther.) Casebere’s practice exists at the intersection of photography, sculpture, architecture and cinema: he builds architectural models, carefully lighting and photographing them so that they appear as real spaces. On display here are works that reimagine the work of Mexican architect Luis Barragán – all majestic colour, light and contemplation – exploring ideas of memory and visual uncertainty.
Next, we’re met by a man on a ladder appearing to batter buildings with a hammer (Blockbuster, 2012). It is, of course, the type of perspectival set-up responsible for so many pictures of tourists appearing to prop up the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but the illusion is amplified by loud, corresponding clangs and taps. A stroll behind the projector screen reveals a tool-toting mechanism clacking merrily in time with the film – the work of Swiss artist duo Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, whose multifaceted practice takes as its focus “the instability of images”, Frydman says.
Other highlights include Tree of Life, a new project from Japanese artist Mari Katayama. Known for her fantastical self-portraits featuring soft sculptures and intricately embellished spaces, Katayama’s work draws on her experience as a differently abled woman (she was born with tibial hemimelia) to whimsical effect. Here, she adds mirrors into the fray, resulting in semi-kaleidoscopic works in which her body parts appear to have multiplied, merging with her surrounding environment of trees, drapery and décor. On the opposite wall, meanwhile, we encounter a series of UFO sightings – desolate landscapes in monotone hues, with skies marked by unexplained trails – conjured by contemporary French artist David de Beyter.
A tiny peep show – conceived by Frydman and realised by the exhibition’s designers, Pam Studio – showcases the work of Colombian photographer Miguel Ángel Rojas in slideshow form. Taken in the 1970s, at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Colombia, the photographs were made in Bogotá’s neighbourhood cinemas where, under cover of darkness, gay men would meet. Rojas set the focus without looking through the viewfinder, allowing the flickering cinema screen to illuminate the scene. The resulting works are hazy and ghostly, treading the line between visibility and voyeurism with deliberate tension.
Finally, in a quiet side room, we are presented with The Wanderers, a thought-provoking five-channel video installation in which Ukrainian artists and filmmakers Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei use their own bodies as stand-ins for those of fallen Russian soldiers in the Carpathian Mountains. A direct allusion to Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, the work poses a sobering challenge to the Romantic notion of the sublime. “War is not an illusion, but in this piece, the artists use illusion to help us understand reality,” explains Frydman. “They created it just two months after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.”
The cumulative impact of this small but decidedly timely collection of artworks, created over various decades by artists from all over the world, is neatly summarised by Frydman’s introductory text for the show. “Each unsettles a certainty,” it reads, “an object presented as evidence, a body recomposed, a light that alters space, a sensation slipping into another. Their aim is not to deceive, but to reveal the fragile movement by which we come to hold something as true.”
