Seven centuries fooling the eye

Fooling the eye by adhering to the laws of optics and perspective has had a long presence in art, with special flourishing in the Renaissance and Baroque, declining in Romanticism, without ever disappearing.

The exhibition Hyperreal. The art of trompe l’oeilorganized with the collaboration of the Community of Madrid, brings a hundred works from all over the world to the Madrid museum, arranging the pieces by subject matter and setting, regardless of their execution date.

Guillermo Solana, artistic director of the museum, during the presentation at a press conference on Tuesday, recalled that trompe l’oeil has a reputation as “art for fools”, especially in the 19th century: “It was like a genre for naive people”, has said, although in reality it is a genre “more philosophical, because it is meta-pictorial”.

The different thematic areas of the exhibition are: Stagingdedicated to still life; Figures, frames and limitsabout cheating through the painted frame; Holes for the curiousrepresentations of niches, openings or cupboards with diverse objects that surprise for their illusionism; Fake walls: planks and wallsturned into scenarios to exhibit objects that show the skill of the painter; perfect messdedicated to artist corners and quod libet (a figure integrated into a background), trompe l’oeil subgenres; call to the senseswith compositions whose main theme is sculptures and flowers; American renewal and its wakededicated to the innovators of the genre in the United States and their influence, and modern trompe l’oeilwith pieces that stand out for showing the ability and imagination of their authors to surprise, with special attention to the 20th and 21st centuries.

Solana has called this organization “chaosmos”: “a mixture of chaos and order” since “there is a certain initial impression of chaos, but one must not be fooled so easily”.

The exhibition ends with a work by the sculptor Isidro Blasco, expressly commissioned to close the tour.