"The assault of illusion" at Santa Mònica

The Assault of Illusion presents a reading of art as a tool for producing illusions and deceptions, and explores how, throughout its history, it has progressively shaped both our desire and what we understand as "reality."

The exhibition addresses concepts such as post-truth, power dynamics, and the mechanisms that hide behind the hegemonic creation of fictions and illusions. Ultimately, it examines the techniques that lie behind art's ability to generate forms of deception that end up affecting the way we perceive the world.

The exploration of these concepts takes place through a journey in which the audience itself is introduced into the sophistication and opacity of artistic techniques of deception that hide complex power relations. This journey accompanies critical reflection on how the arts have historically played an important role in the creation of these techniques, and it raises the thesis of whether today, in a world of deep fakes and artificial intelligence/creation, the role of art should not precisely be to reveal these techniques built up over the centuries.

Journey

To achieve the journey proposed as a visit, The Assault of Illusion suggests a dynamic scenographic itinerary -with mirrors, veils, and movable walls where various artists' contributions are presented- which will lead the audience to constantly enter and exit the illusion created by the artworks themselves.

The route suggests a constant transition of modes of representation and the superimposition of expectations that this may provoke in the audience: a painting creates a different effect of reality than a photograph, a video, or an installation, and the exhibition constantly plays with how people move from one effect of reality to another, through the overlapping of formats.

To achieve this effect of transition, of superimposing viewpoints and discursive layers, the exhibition is structured into four parts along the journey:

1. The space of illusion, a place where the laws of space are not at the service of reason but of seduction, a place governed by the will to manipulate the point of view.

2. The space of revelation, which projects the deconstruction and technical unveiling of the first space. This revelation, however, is naïve, since we all know, from the moment we leave childhood, that all illusion is an artifact.

3. The space of questioning, where the artists rebel against the effects and act as exorcists of the machine, asking what the role of illusion technologies is in our time.

4. The space of recapitulation, where a genealogy is presented of how, throughout its history, art has produced this oscillation of veils and revelations, similar to what the audience has experienced after this journey.

Artists: A.A.Murakami (Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves), Alain Josseau, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Anish Kapoor, Antonio Gagliano and Verónica Lahitte, Berndnaut Smilde, Chico Amaral, Fabian Knecht, Ilê Sartuzi, Juan Antonio Cerezuela, Julia Santa Olalla, Klaus Frahm, Leandro Erlich, Lucrecia Dalt, MANS O and Joan Sandoval, Manuel Calderón, Miquel Màrtir, Núria Güell, Víctor Enrich, Xesca Salvà.