The body of the master is afraid – Newspaper Kommersant No. 7 (7452) of 01/17/2023

“This is not a body” is the title of an exhibition of hyperrealist sculpture at the Musée Mayol in Paris. The correspondent of Kommersant in France took the opportunity to wander among strange creatures with human features Alexey Tarkhanov.

The title “This is not a body” (Ceci n’est pas un corps) is a paraphrase of Rene Magritte. A tube is not a tube, a body is not a body. Sculptures of hyperrealism are almost like people. They are made of plastic, silicone, latex, bronze, plaster, painted in the colors of human skin, sometimes dressed up in human clothes, and sometimes left naked. They were made in different techniques and forms. One of the videos accompanying the exhibition shows the process of obtaining an exact cast of a girl who will become a sculpture. But next to these one-to-one castings, there are also strange works of sculptors who deform bodies like comprachoses or create forms that nature capitulates to.

Some artists use bodily tricks to depict “simple, ordinary people” in all their ugliness. It can only be considered an accident that Duane Hanson’s Two Workers standing at the stepladder are works of art, and the couple of Parisian pensioners looking at them are a life phenomenon. But there are also looser options, where there is more trust in the imagination of the viewer, as in the monochrome and not so nauseatingly believable sculptures of George Segal. The American, one of the creators and heralds of hyperrealism, without going into details, depicted his models in plaster, while his conditional people are much more lively than dolls painted like a person in a one-to-one scale that is humiliating for a sculpture.

The sculpture of hyperrealism was born of pop art, it is not for nothing that one of the halls is decorated with a bust of Andy Warhol on a high-tech stand, like the head of Professor Dowell. The portrait by the Japanese Kazu Hiro is placed as if his Warhol is receiving a parade of squares of artificial flesh lined up in a line with body parts cut down as if by a butcher: lips, a chest with a nipple, part of a palm with a tattoo – by another artist, Italian Walter Adam Casotto. Casotto’s sculptures are depicted fragments of his own body, pieces of a potential self-portrait on a giant scale, something like a collection of special signs, behind which a person is completely lost.

Many hyperrealists are not averse to portraying themselves. Like Gilles Barbier, who has long appeared in the form of a dwarf doll in different outfits. At the exhibition, he is in a dress from Velasquez’s Menin, depicting two characters at the same time: an infanta and a dwarf. The Frenchman Fabien Merel sculpted his double, growing out of a tree trunk sawn into pieces, creating his sculptural self-portrait in the form of a hamadryad – from a poetic point of view, in the form of a natural club – from an everyday one.

A closet with a girl’s head, thin arms and beautiful legs – “Refrigerator” by the British Alain Jones, who interfered with design and sculpture. This is the most modest of his furniture nudes. No one else would dare to exhibit his chairs or tables, the basis of which were sculptures of half-naked girls in leather miniatures – feminism completely canceled such a game, only this work remained, where the beauty’s heart is immersed in a deep electric cold.

The exhibition at the Mayol Museum can be divided into two parts. One of them is a pure exposition of hyperrealists, and very famous artists. Here is the brilliant Ron Muek (although represented by a very small work), and Sam Jinks, and Carol Feuerman, and John di Andrea, and the Macedonian Žarko Basheski with his giant growing out of the ground (“Ordinary Man”). It captures like a parade of incredible achievements in the image of a living body or in the invention of outlandish creatures, like an amusement park, a kind of authentic Hollywood story with artificial characters.

The second part is a more subtle moment when the masters of hyperrealism come to visit the owners of the museum. It was created by the gallery owner and philanthropist Dina Verny (1919-2009) in memory of her older friend, the great sculptor Aristide Maillol (1861-1944), lover, spiritual father, savior from the hands of the Gestapo. Dina turned out to be the personification of youth, girlish magic, strength and temptation for the artist. The body has always been his favorite topic, in young Dean he saw the embodiment of his ideal. Maillol endlessly wrote and sculpted her, filling his workshop with a multitude of the most sublime, the most mundane images of his girlfriend. It is enough to compare his poetic canvas “Two Deans” with small terracotta sculptures modestly presented nearby, where the muse is depicted, in particular, naked and on all fours.

The curators introduce one work of hyperrealists into the world of Maillol, full of passion. Among the buxom and round-thighed bronze Dean, Ariel by John di Andrea looks surprisingly pale, on which he portrayed his daughter, albeit real, not spiritual. In the contrast of power and anemic, passion and pacification of the flesh, it is better to see how the artists’ view of the human body and the soul of art is changing.

Among the fictional and real characters of the hyperrealists there are creatures that look like people, there are even those who speak with a human voice, like a mannequin in a hospital wheelchair chatting about modern art – “Jonathan” by Daniel Glaser and Magdalena Kunz. These are not the Grevin or Tussauds wax personas, and even less the glamorous adult latex dolls. Even those that are modeled after the size and dimensions of the human body are repulsively ugly. What does it mean – realistic, without any prefix “hyper”.

Perhaps to allow visitors to understand the limits of both the sculpted and their own bodies, the Maillol Museum is offering special visits for those who are willing to come to the exhibition naked. I have seen footage of people viewing the exhibition, a little embarrassed of each other and the sculptures looking at them, remarkably reminiscent of hyperrealist works. I did not go. There is nowhere to put my notebook and camera, and without them I already feel like I’m naked in the halls of any museum.