Workshops Just an illusion
Hugues Reip
Several works in the exhibition L’Évasion play with our perception of reality. Games of scale, perspective, and pareidolia fill Hugues Reip’s work, which is strongly influenced by the dreamlike worlds of Lewis Carroll and Jonathan Swift.
Based on the works Black Sheeps, Les Pistils, 0,25, and Flowers, the first workshop approaches photography by defining a frame and a setting to work on the point of view, the play of perspective, and the different planes of an image. By optical illusion, the proportions are reversed. The kids also put themselves on stage to become a giant or a microscopic being. The students recreate a world of the infinitely small in which the giants are actually tiny, and vice versa.
The second workshop takes as its starting point the work Night Music (Deep) (à Öyvind Fahlström), in which hybrid magnetized figures at the crossroads of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms form a surreal constellation floating in a midnight blue evoking sometimes the depths of the sea, sometimes the sky.
By cutting out shapes from sheets of colored paper at random, without trying to represent something specifically, students recompose shapes that “remind one of”. These are pareidolies, optical illusions that consist of associating a shapeless and ambiguous visual stimulus with a clear and identifiable element, often a human or animal form. Also present in the exhibition L’Évasion, the sculpture L’Orque which represents a rock, is an example of pareidolia.