For a long time we have been trying to explain and understand the hyperrealism of Ron Mueck (Melbourne, 1958). Now we have a new opportunity to do so by visiting the exhibition of La Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain de Paris, curated by Hervé Chandès and Charlie Clarke, in what is the third time that the artist and foundation have collaborated together.
During the visit I have not stopped thinking about the disturbing presence of those more than one hundred immense skulls scattered throughout the transparent rooms of the building, from the work Mass (2017), a title that must be understood in its meaning of “mass” and not as “mass”, and the recent Dead Weight (2021), because they seemed to me to be a reflection of myself in the face of the existential doubts of our time.
But that figuration of the mind lasted only a few seconds after verifying the effect on the conscience of an aesthetic proposal that immediately reminded me of the skull seen in the form of an anamorphosis in the painting The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein (1533), although in that case it was about seeing the effort to continue the life of a lost diplomacy and of course the Vanitas: I stopped at the parallelism to point out the links of that past of the beginnings of the Modern World with the rabid present of a future after the last postmodernity, because my whole being gravitated towards Ron Mueck’s sculptures as if they were scales over my eyes without letting me see that the light is no longer on.
And then hyperrealism became intelligible to me just as, after metempsychosis, death acquires another meaning, since the hyperrealism exposed here places us in front of a vision of the world, in which objects appear as elements without cause, incomprehensible , certainly dark, ambiguous, threatening like that pack of enormous dogs, Three Dogs that invite us to ask ourselves what they obey, and why they scare us, while we listen to undefined sounds around us, which indicate the distances between what we see and what we see. truth of what we see, as the song of a bird in the wood denotes the expanse of deserted fields, where a passerby marches hastily to the near station; and the path he travels will be recorded in his memories due to the excitement that new places give him, the unusual acts, the recent talk, the goodbyes of the farewell that accompany him even in the silence of the night, and in the sweetness of the next return.
This is the moment when a sick society wakes up, overwhelmed by the pain to which it is subjected, and feels an intense joy in the manner of Georges Bernanos, seeing the expression of its anguish reflected in objects of incomparable mystery. What joy! Ron Mueck takes us back to the dawn of a new day, far away from the tormented, sleepless nights. As an invitation to get up, to find relief in our efforts. And in the hope of being comforted by the ability to suffer when one learns to listen to the organic clicks of objects that allow one to truly open one’s eyes to look into the kaleidoscope of darkness in which we live, to savor, thanks to a momentary glow of consciousness, the sense in which objects are submerged.
Other times, as in A Girl (2006), the mystery of the birth of a child is proven. The spectator feels his own heat and also the materiality of the viscera and blood. As in a slap of reality, he looks for it in what he sees and wakes him up as in the origin. All the rest of the mortals appear as very blurry things next to that A Girl: it makes us think of the warmth of her presence and the weight of her body almost aches. Yes, as sometimes happens, we are presented with the face of a woman who is going to show herself with a single purpose: to find her; the same as those people who go on a trip to see with their own eyes a desired city, imagining that in a real thing the charm of the dream can be savored.
When we contemplate Man in a Boat (2002), a disturbing image of a man sitting on the prow of a ship, we see that he has around him, like a ring, the thread of hours, the order of years and worlds. Upon becoming aware of himself, and covering his nakedness with his hands, he instinctively consults them, and, in a second, he reads the place on earth where he is, the time that has elapsed until his awakening ; but these arrangements can be confused and broken to the point that, Justin Paton said of him, he seems to “withdraw or enter into interior states that we cannot access.”
Because if, after a sleepless night, at dawn, you are surprised in this position, it is because you know that the sun is the call that will make you speed through the paths of time and space, and at the moment of opening the eyelids will imagine that he went to sleep a few months before and in a different land.
And so Ron Mueck’s hyperrealism slowly recomposes the peculiar traits of the human personality with the spirit in turmoil, to find out, without actually succeeding, where one is, while everything spins in the dark: things, countries, countries. years. Seeing this exhibition is a powerful and unforgettable experience.
Ron Mueck. Cartier Foundation. www.cartierfoundation.com.Paris. Until November 5th.