Negación del espacio en el arte contemporáneoambigüedad e ilusión

Resumen

ABSTRACT Throughout history, humans have wondered about the nature of reality, its existence and the space it takes. These questions have tried to be solved by fields of knowledge, such as philosophy, science and art. Precisely, for this last one the representation of space can offer an evident knowledge about humans’ interpretations of space depending on the own conceptualization of space. Another option is that we can deduce how the created images themselves have intervened in this conceptualization of space. Focusing on the analysis of these possibilities and starting from a historical review and with the aim of specifying the last tendencies and ways of interpretation, we will analyze how painting reflects the rejection of the representation of a three-dimensional reality as an only paradigm of interpretation of its own from the last century and contemporary period. In order to conduct this research, we have studied concepts such as space, visual perception (part I); spatial representation methods that were classified as paradigms and have been a turning point in this matter, such as the mathematics perspective in the Renaissance; as well as an evolution of this last one taken to the extreme, which resulted in anamorphosis; and the main and diverse representational possibilities, which emerged afterwards and is present nowadays (part II). It is our intention to emphasize the connotations that anamorphosis has in the contemporary pictorial representation. Therefore, the works of the artist Felice Varini will be key in this doctoral dissertation since the possibilities (technically based on the strategic use of perspective to produce anamorphosis) that it offers to comprehend space in its many readings, will provide the main ideas of new rhetoric that opened the ways of interpreting the infinite images that exist in the contemporary physical space nowadays. From a triple paradox deduced from the analysis of the works of Varini, based on the “bi-dimensionality” and “n-dimensionality”, we introduce a new paradigm of interpretation of the image along with space and its representation (part III). A paradigm faced with the noticeable presence of images, which together with the relevance of digital media, complicates the own and individual rhetoric about what we conceive as space or reality. All of this has also been reflected on painting since the Pop Art movement, which has arrived at present evolving not only technically, but also its rhetoric, while society has also evolved towards digitalization and consumerism. This reality is seen from the flatness of screens that has resulted in new pictorial tendencies that we will analyze according to the representation of space seen in Varini’s works (part IV). Our final contribution in this research is to apply (based on an experimental methodology) the interpretative possibilities that anamorphosis (as a meta-image) results in to the last conceptual and stylistic lines of contemporary painting in the Western World. Our aim with this is to promote new rhetoric from the art practices themselves. All in all, this research has allowed us to analyze in detail the different strategies used to represent space in painting, contextualizing the diverse conceptualizations of space that have taken place in different periods of time in what is considered as the Western World. In this matter, we conclude by affirming that nowadays concepts such as two-dimensionality, ambiguity and illusion are part of the contemporary strategies of painting.