The Cracked Portrait 10, 2024
The Cracked Portrait
Taisuke Mohri's "Cracked Portrait" looks in a different way at the relationship between hyperrealistic representation with material reality. Extending the boundaries of art of drawing, exhibited portrait-objects raise new questions related to images that outrun nature in representation of reality and its possibly new quality of transparency.
Combining different parts of a face and using a pencil Mohri creates an imaginary face of inexistent person and covers it with the layer of glass with cracks in it. The Material Cracks enter the representation producing distinctive and blurry segments of a portrait as if parts of the picture present a face behind the window during rainy day.
Thus the material dimension of a glass, its fractures, and drawn image enters particular relationship where the separation line between represented and real, image and substance is not so obvious any more. The nature’s material, the substance of glass in these images is an accomplice of simulation and mimesis and not something that in reverse gives away the fake nature of an image. As soon as glass cracks, the numerous layers of Mohri’s objects start to “play” with each other creating simultaneous and multiple contacts, while complicating the structure of drawing and its perception.
Seemingly 3-dimensional image of a head interacts with the flat layer of glass which covers it. 2-dimensional paper merge with blurred parts that stress the flatness of glass, which sections in its turn are separated by 3-dimensional and physical splits. Finally, crack itself starts to penetrate the illusionary space and acts as a part of image. The Crack in substance becomes The Line in the picture. Different layers, imaginary and physical, reinforce the illusion in the same time cutting and kicking back the eye of the onlooker that flows into Taisuke Mohri’s cracked hyperreality.
The Cracked Portrait 11, 2024
The Cracked Portrait 9, 2024