The construction of illusion

The Centre d'Arts Santa Mònica is hosting The Assault of Illusion, a group exhibition bringing together several artists and disciplines to examine how art has helped construct what we understand as reality, and to expose the visual traps we encounter in the media and in the age of post-truth.

The show, on view through September 27, unfolds in a space that is constantly shifting. Mirrors, fabrics, movable walls and other elements allow the environment to transform much as reality itself does. Because there is no fixed constant within this reality, that instability directly affects how we perceive it.

Taking a stance that resists exclusivity, the deliberately eclectic mix of artists and practices sets up an evident tension between point of view and the mechanisms that produce images — and, by extension, the discourses, narratives and messages they communicate.

The exhibition is organized into several sections:

• Visual seduction: a space that appeals not to reason but to seduction, to illusion.
• Mechanisms: Revelation. It shows how reality is manipulated to achieve a desired effect.
• Critique: A questioning. The artists' reflection against the machinery of deception.
• Historical reading: A recap, tracing historical and practical examples.

Showing and not showing. Deliberately concealing. Creating an illusion of reality. Preparing something to be consumed docilely. The true purpose of the show is to prompt deep reflection on how these discourses are structured by spheres of power, to reveal, in other words, both the what and the how.

Painting, photography and video coexist within the space. Each language, each discipline in the show constructs and confers a new reality.

Art is a tool that produces deceptions, and those deceptions have shaped our desires and reshaped what we understand — and attempt to pass off — as reality. If what makes us human is the capacity to create myths, to invent realities that feel more real than reality itself, shouldn't art also be responsible for unmasking these deceptions, the techniques and mechanisms that build these fictions, especially given today's postmodern world, its post-truth discourses, and an environment saturated with fake news and endless messaging?

Through the exhibition's dynamic, shape-shifting staging, visitors to The Assault of Illusion become participants — at times disoriented, drifting in and out, one foot in reality and the other in illusion. The deliberate blurring of that line is one of the show's great strengths, precisely when the break isn't obvious.

In January 1964, psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni published an essay in Les Temps Modernes on the denial of reality. The genocide in Palestine, climate disasters, and the rise of the far right in the West are today's media equivalents. Knowing that something isn't real or true does nothing to diminish its power. Society seems unprepared to face the full truth of what is happening and why, particularly in the eyes of states and governments. According to this logic, information should be softened and made palatable, the way we might handle a child. And yet the modern individual sometimes prefers not to know. It's easier to buy a comforting lie, because the alternative is terrifying. Confronting discomfort, realizing we've been deceived or betrayed by the ideas and discourses we believed in, impoverishes us, shames us, makes us feel foolish. The production of deliberate narratives designed to generate illusions of reality is more active today than ever.

A.A. Murakami (Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves) present Beyond the Horizon, an installation that challenges the relationship between appearance and reality. Clouds that look entirely real sit inside a space of representation, within an interior. The effect stuns viewers, who find themselves confronting the impossible.

In Automatique War, Alain Josseau stages a fictional newscast covering war in real time, complete with all the disinformation and propaganda typical of armed conflict — material that feels all too familiar to viewers. As expected, the piece exposes the insidious codes of television language, casting doubt on the credibility we grant journalism and official narratives in our postmodern society. On a large screen, a fake report presents the robotization of war across a period running from 2017 to 2026. Real speeches are combined with archival footage and images taken out of context. There are staged "live" connections, much like those common in our own reality, alongside a model depicting cities in ruins and AI-generated imagery. The cameras are robotic. The war is fictional, but the narrative is built from real stories and testimonies, compiled and orchestrated by an artificial intelligence.

Chico Amaral presents automatically generated images that appear to arise by chance, raising the tension between our demand for meaning and coherence in the images we consume, and the reality that these images are produced randomly, spontaneously, and without inherent significance.

Mama, by Aneta Grzeszykowska, is a photographic series in which a young girl appears to be playing with her mother. The maternal figure is, in fact, a hyperrealistic wax statue. The image unsettles our sense of subjectivity. Reality versus desire. How will we come to relate to robotic figures? Who — and what — will they resemble? What roles will they play in our society? Will we eventually replace real human affection with artificial, simulated affection?

Nimbus Kunstmuseum Hal, by Berndnaut Smilde, offers a different kind of cloud — one that fades away, unreachable at great heights. A vaporous material that materializes within a real setting. Since childhood, the cloud has appeared as a magical element, tied to idealization and fairy tales, inevitably leading toward daydream, toward disconnecting the imagination from reality. We are adults, yes, but we still want to see clouds, to be — literally — in the clouds. This is, without question, one of the exhibition's most striking works, imbued with a captivating, almost hypnotic power.

The Illusion of Owning a Home, by Madrid-based artist Manuel Calderón, is a miniature model fitted with peepholes that create the illusion of a spacious apartment and rooms. Impossible connections, hallways and phantasmagoria bring into question the illusion of accessing a home of reasonable size — an illusion the piece proves impossible through its play of lenses and perception.

Isolation, by Fabian Knecht, presents a thirty-two-square-meter section of Horta Park at the end of a corridor. Introducing a natural space into an environment as artificial as the exhibition itself generates frustration. Viewers want to enjoy this patch of nature but cannot. It resembles an entrance leading nowhere — a perfect metaphor for a post-natural era: the deliberate reconstruction of green spaces, artificially placed to soften the advance of concrete in major cities; the destruction of nature in the name of civilization, followed by nature's reconquest at the hands of its own destroyer.

Leaving the exhibition, visitors must once again confront the current gap between what the artists propose and the everyday consumption of information by the average citizen. Perhaps simply exposing the mechanisms of propaganda, how we are deceived through the saturation of manipulated images, narratives and information, is no longer enough. The question now might be: what weapons do we have to confront these constructions? How do we reckon with this today?

In Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern (2004), philosopher and scientist Bruno Latour argues that we have spent a long time — perhaps too long — insisting that all discourse is, in fact, a social construction. That this social construction reveals that behind what we once naively accepted as real were powers, discourses and interests that played out, and continue to play out, through the society of the spectacle and an intentional overproduction of imagery.

Today, this idea — which once produced a critical intellectual effect of great and necessary depth, this unveiling of hidden interests, this demonstration that reality is a dense and complex construction — is ultimately used by some YouTuber to claim the earth is flat, that the snow that fell on Madrid in the middle of the pandemic was fake, that the pandemic itself was a lie invented by the government to control us, that the chemtrails left behind by planes crossing the sky are actually chemicals or aerosols sprayed for mind control, or even that Australia doesn't exist.

If our society is home to climate change deniers, conspiracy theorists and flat-earthers, we have to ask ourselves whether "trust nothing" is really the idea, or the tool, we need today.