You enter a museum full of works of classical art. Or, to be more exact, works of art that is presented to you as classical. Your steps wring creaks of complaint from the old parquet laid in a fishbone pattern. You lose your way in the labyrinths of exhibition rooms and squeeze through crowds in the passageways. All this in order to get to the painting you want to see. And there it is: in a heavy frame, cordoned off by velvet ropes that are always being run into by children who have been tricked into coming here for a day out. Someone right by your ear is snapping away with a camera with a noiseless shutter (no flash allowed!). All this fuss, and even the reflection-marred layer of glass covering the painted surface cannot prevent you making contact with the masterpiece.
In the middle of all this agitation is it possible not to be swept up in the excitement? Can you avoid drowning your perceptions blindly in the monumentality of what is happening? Is it possible to separate a masterpiece from its natural habitat, complete with artificial lighting? Would the work of art look any less of a masterpiece in a different setting? To help us think about this, let’s look at the work of the Spanish artist Julio Anaya Cabanding.
Malaga is a city in the south of Spain that is famous as the birthplace of the genius Picasso. Julio Anaya Cabanding was also born in Malaga, in 1987. As a teenager, Julio made the most of opportunities to visit large European cities, including important art institutions such as the Louvre, the Pinacoteca in the Vatican, the Uffizi Galleries, and the Museo Nacional del Prado. Stendhal syndrome, though, does not affect only those (lucky ones who are unaware of their own happiness) whose natural habitat is pulsating masses of marble and majestic ceiling paintings.
Not only did the strain of aesthetic overload not break Julio; on the contrary, it infected him with the idea of partaking in the process of creation as much as possible. He continued his education in his native city; the institution he chose was the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Malaga. Julio admits that at university he was taught everything except the craft of painting. The educational process largely focused on art history and theory. This was probably a long-term advantage, though.
As a student, Julio continued studying classical painting from museum collections, but now the pure delight of the first impressions that these paintings had made on him was deepened by the knowledge he gained at university. He was sufficiently competent to recognize different artists and their works by observing their personal styles and techniques and to deepen his understanding by noticing historical and contextual nuances.
The joy of recognition is one of the primary sources of pleasure during our interaction with the surrounding environment and with perception of the latter. Whether this is recognition of an art object that has lodged in the memory, the resurrection of an art object’s image in one’s thoughts, or observation of a plausible real world painted on a canvas, Aristotle’s name for it was mimesis. He used the concept of mimesis to explain the pleasure we get from noticing resemblances. (An example of the opposite point of view is Gilles Deleuze’s idea that only that which is unclear and unrecognized can get human beings thinking.)
Julio received another concentrated dose of inspiration at an exhibition of work by Adrian Ghenie in Malaga. He had seen Ghenie’s expressionistic paintings in catalogues in the university library, but actually coming face to face with the paintings had a piercing, almost hallucinogenic effect on him. His exultation at mimesis, combined with enthusiasm sparked by the paintings he had seen, brought him to the point where he was ready to act. He began his creative career by recreating instantly recognizable works of art from local museums in Malaga. His first ‘imitations’ were based on works from the collection of the museum and birthplace of Picasso.
Even in his earliest works Julio paid special attention to the picturesque moulding of the frame surrounding the painting. His Instagram profile contains landscapes painted with an almost plein-air kind of freedom and framed with lustrous gilded frames. He imitates not just the frame’s materiality but also the setting in which the painting is hung. Precise gradient light that casts shadows below the paintings models the space between the painting and the wall to which it is attached.
The word for this kind of optical illusion is trompe-l’oeil – which in French means ‘deceives the eye’ or ‘deceptive appearance’. Trompe-l’oeil is the name for a genre of figurative art and also for a set of techniques that ‘create an illusion of something that is impossible or, on the contrary, a representation of something that is accessible and tangible but does not in fact exist.’
Trompe-l’oeil is often associated with agonism (competition, rivalry) in art: the skilled painter is one who can depict a fly sitting on the surface of a painting so realistically that the viewer decides to swipe the annoying insect away. The resemblances painted by Julio convincingly replicate original paintings together with their frames, including Claude Monet’s Waterlilies, Vermeer’s Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, a self-portrait by Rembrandt, John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, and Arnold Böcklin’s Island of the Dead. Overall, if you were to set out to look at every work by Julio, you’d get a short course in classical painting without having to read Gombrich‘s The Story of Art. However, when you look more closely, it becomes clear that what Julio is aiming at is not a verisimilitude that confuses the viewer. The trompe-l’oeils he creates are not about technical finesse or the artist’s need for self-satisfaction.
In this respect his paintings should not be seen as trying to reproduce the original – especially when we bear in mind the etymology of the word ‘reproduction’. The prefix ‘re-’ means ‘back’ or ‘again’. Julio’s works are executed confidently and with talent but without going to torturous lengths in pursuit of a precise copy. (As if anyone in their right mind today would anyway set out to create a copy of a painting and call it ‘art’ – except perhaps for a tyro restorer praising their first accomplished copy). What the trompe l’oeil does here is serve as a playful instrument; it is merely a way to convey meaning to the viewer, drawing the latter in through the use of familiar visual allusions.
Julio uses the moment of recognition as a bridge to lead the viewer from precision of depiction to a semantic cauldron where he initiates reflection on questions such as ‘What is a masterpiece?’, ‘What or who can proclaim a work of art a masterpiece?’, and ‘Will a picture remain a masterpiece if it is stripped of its customary setting in an institution?’
To continue his research, Julio decided to place his paintings in settings that were unnatural for them. He started borrowing the iconic pearls of museum collections and taking them out onto the streets. But, no, this doesn't involve illegal actions or theft of paintings. This is theft of images. Julio recreates by hand works of ‘museum’ quality on the walls of derelict buildings, gas stations, embankment railings, and car parks, or fearlessly ‘installs’ them against a background of strident graffiti. In general, he chooses the least obvious and unprepossessing locations:
In some cases Julio returns the depiction of the image to the place depicted in it. His recreation of View of the Castle in Gaucín, a painting by the Spanish romanticist Jenaro Pérez Villaamil, is to be seen on the spot from which this view is supposed to have been painted by its author. Thus Julio does not simply replicate a landscape from the Prado Museum in an unexpected location but influences where viewers stand in space and controls what they will see in addition to the painting itself. He introduces into the streetscape a contrasting unit that pulls the attention of passers-by away from the tagged walls and sets their minds itching as they go looking for references that have lain gathering dust.
The educational function has the same effect: paintings from museums, like all art in general, may be associated with elitism and inaccessibility – both conceptual and physical. The distance created by ‘high’ art limits its popularity and the extent to which it can be included in people’s daily lives. It is another matter when to see the same masterpieces, you don’t have to stand around in a queue in a museum – Julio makes them part of the setting, fitting seamlessly in with road signs and house numbers. Does this mean that the work of art is art to any lesser extent? No. But this gesture demonstrates that a work of art can be valuable in itself, without needing to be accompanied by high-flown texts or commentary from art critics.
What is this if not a protest against the institutional structures that influence who can consume art, feel it, and cast judgment on it – and where and when? This is a protest against conservatism in whatever form, whether it is the standards of classical painting or the conventionality of contemporary art and its white box. A pointer to the need for works of art to be inclusive and for opposition to snobbism; a pointer to exclusion and to the pompousness of art organizations in general. Incidentally, a mood of protest can be read even in Julio’s Instagram nickname: ACAB is short for ‘All Cops Are Bastards’.
When you take a masterpiece out of its exhibition surroundings, you create new conditions in which it can be observed and perceived. Using such non-standard settings, Julio liberates the paintings from the criteria used by the average museum visitor to recognize art. The list of attributes of art for the ordinary viewer usually includes the following: a massive Baroque frame with bas reliefs; a degree of elevation in how the painting is hung – so that viewers have to look up at it from below, slightly tilting back their heads; an evangelical subject; and a monochromatic background that does not conflict with the painting and does not eclipse it. New criteria are constantly being added to this list of stereotypes.
To make a final break with tradition, Julio changes the techniques used for painting the masterpiece. The material he uses as a basis is cardboard – a nightmare for restorers and good news for eco-activists. The tired, dried-up, torn pieces of cardboard underline the fragmentary character of his mimesis. Is this a debunking of the masterpiece? Or a test of status? One thing Julio succeeds in doing for sure is to isolate what is essential.
By removing them from the gallery context and executing them on found cardboard, Julio liberates masterpieces from centuries of being evaluated using traditional means. The works acquire a new and at the same time everlasting value – human, emotional, existential.