You’re at an exhibition of the latest contemporary art. Your gaze slides over the white half-empty walls, just occasionally snagging on a flare of visual interference. Your perception needs several seconds to make out what you’ve just noticed. Is this part of an exhibition that imitates and at the same time defamiliarizes reality? Or is it an incidental interior object that has been left in the space due to a lapse of attention on the part of the curators? You decide to treat the object as part of the exhibition and try to evaluate the skill with which it has been created. And here you get hit by the next wave of confusion: the method used to put together these strange objects has almost been erased. Attempts to make sense of what you’ve just seen cause you to engage all the images in your memory in a bid to discover in the object the familiar traits of objects, symbols, or scenes that exist in real life. This is a synthesizing of meanings from visually processed information; it merges with the captions that you have read, which urge you to take a new attitude to everlasting themes.     

To get the complete picture, all you need to do now is start interacting with the abstract paintings in whimsical frames, the heaps of clay pretending to be ceramic sculptures, and a ready-made involving wires somewhere in a corner of the room. Amidst this confusion of almost worn-out story-telling, amidst the strange mass of the unrecognizable, is it possible to imagine art that painstakingly creates the illusion of reality? Can realism and even more technically meticulous hyperrealism become part of this system? Or should we simply consign it to the category of craftsmanship, denying good old drawing any claim to being contemporary art? Below, we shake ourselves free of stereotypical categories and take a look at the case of the artist CJ Hendry.

CJ Hendry was born South Africa in 1988. She regarded herself as ‘not very creative’ – which is possibly why her first decisions about what to do in life had nothing to do with art. She did not go to art school. For her undergraduate course she chose to study architecture at the University of Queensland in Australia. Disappointment in her chosen subject caused her to transfer to the Faculty of Finance to learn accountancy. After all, who among us is immune to our parents’ ideas of a ‘proper’ profession? Who has not wanted to ditch this mandatory but senseless learning? At the same time as studying, Hendry had a part-time job as a sales consultant in a Chanel shop. It seems she had sufficient time in the empty boutique to study the bags in depth – it was these legendary pieces of design and other items of luxury fashion that were the first objects that she reproduced on paper.

In 2012 Hendry decided to abandon her financial education altogether – her three-year course had by then entered what was already its fifth year. That same year, she published her first work on Instagram. She used a graphite pencil to imitate some of the most desirable items in the world of haute couture and the ordinary everyday things that surround us. Employing the hyper-trompe l’oeil style, she depicted men’s shoes by Yves Saint Laurent, Birkin bags by Hermes, basketball balls, boxing gloves, balloons, plates with doughnuts, dollar notes (one of which was bought by Ye), flower buds, etc. In some compositions Hendry literally repeats one of the canonical techniques of the ‘optical illusion’ – whereby the image exits the bounds of the limited space situated within the plane of the sheet of paper.

These objects, the delights of capitalist fantasies taken from opposite poles of affordability, were equalized by Hendry. Stripped of chromatic richness and drawn with an identical degree of intricate detailing, they were given the same status; the differences between them were smoothed flat by their inherent superficiality. At the same time, their colourless image remained attractive, largely due to Hendry’s artistic mastery. Proof of the attraction of her hyper-realistic drawings – sufficient at the very least to get people buying – was the first sale she made, which, on top of everything else, took place without the help of a gallery or art dealer. In 2014 Hendry sold a drawing of a pair of boots belonging to RM Williams for $10,000 on Instagram, after the collector himself wrote to her to make an offer. The next major sale of her work involved a drawing pf a crumpled Gucci bag – for which the director of Macquarie Bank in Australia paid $50,000.

A turning point in the evolution of Hendry’s style came when she started including colour in her work. In addition to the unmissable turning up of the colour saturation, colour itself became a subject of her study. This is colour as a synonym for colourfulness – literally, for brushstrokes of paint. Colour as what an image is modelled by and what the image depicts. In 2017, as part of a collaboration with Christian Louboutin, Hendry created ‘Complimentary Colours’, a series of works in which she used coloured pencils to imitate blobs of paint freshly squeezed onto a palette. This was pure colour straight from the tube, with a glossy shine, stiff peaks on the surface, and falling shadows – Hendry recreated in detail the thick but shifting texture of paint.

In her work Hendry makes extensive use of photos of blobs of colour. She starts by applying paint to the white surface using a spatula and records the result. The use of a digital image as a reference is a distinguishing trait of hyperrealism. Thanks to the impressively high resolution offered by modern cameras and monitors, the hyperreal pictures created using these visual sources do not so much copy existing reality as deliberately accentuate the materiality of the object depicted. Hyperrealism does not set out to optimize the vision with which it works. Instead of creating picturesque effects, concealing what has to be concealed so as to harmonize the composition, and emphasizing something that has conceptual weight, hyperrealist artists use all the elements of the original image.

Unlike the earlier photorealists, who in imitating photography, omitted or abstracted particular details. Emerging from pop art as the antithesis to abstract expressionism and minimalism, photorealism used photography as a date base, a mood board that recognizes the camera as an appropriate way to reproduce reality. Still, photorealism continued to be oriented on maintaining figurativeness.

Bzy contrast, hyperrealism is more meticulous and involves imitation of an object’s tangibility – to an even greater extent than we are capable of feeling in direct interaction. The finest details that are invisible to the human eye now have the chance to be manifested – caught on the matrix of the camera and drawn on paper or painted on canvas. In this respect hyperrealism illustrates the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard: by depicting an optically convincing illusion of reality, hyperrealism creates a new, false reality and ‘models something which in actual fact never existed’. If you haven’t already lost your way in this range of different manipulations with reality, you will be able to distinguish surrealism too from the above movements – obviously, it has nothing at all to do with simulation of real reality.

Later, the identical macro strokes of paint in Hendry’s works thicken and are grouped into shapes that are whimsical, sometimes anthropomorphic, sometimes remote from earthly forms. The series called ‘Rorschach’ which she created in 2019 used the hyperrealist toolbox in a non-obvious way. With the help of coloured pencils she depicted fat blots of colour. Almost symmetrical with respect to the vertical axis, they resemble cards used in a psychological Rorschach test. But here the characteristics of the pencil drawing are not employed ‘for their intended purpose’, are not used in order to transmit an image.       

The hyperrealist drawing does not model something familiar, recognizable, figurative. The brushstrokes form abstract forms; they engage associative capabilities and activate areas of perception that operate not through resemblance with reality but through images that come randomly. The abstraction of spots, an abstraction that develops in art as a way to move away from depiction of reality, matter, and real things, combines here with the material recognizability of paint. Together, they create an opportunity for the viewers’ individual experience to be included in the interpretation of what has been seen. The viewer is a co-participant in an improvised Rorschach test in which each detail of the image is subject to processing by the subconscious, by fantasies, the imagination, the spirit.

Participation in her works is a real and even mandatory option at exhibitions of Hendry's art. She sets up Rorschach as an entertainment exhibition: to get to the wall exhibiting the art, viewers have to pass through the labyrinth of an art-therapy department upholstered with soft panels; there are several trampolines in the way. This is a labyrinth inside a white cube where, barefoot and in special clothes, you find yourself stuck in dead ends, bumping into bouncers, ready to do anything to find a solution, a way out. You finally gain your freedom at the moment when you come into the closest, almost intimate contact with Hendry'sobjects. What is this if not a metaphor for interaction – for the groping for an understanding of contemporary art?