Even if we were standing right in front of one of Ana de Alvear's works, you probably wouldn’t believe me, but what you're seeing isn't real.
The San Diego Museum of Art just installed a major exhibition by de Alvear, a contemporary artist based in Madrid.
The exhibition is called "Everything You See Could Be A Lie," and walking into the gallery, on the first floor of SDMA, the progression of lies begins.
"One of the things that happens when you enter the exhibition is that you think everything is a photograph. But it isn't. So that's the first lie. And then you see some stuffed animals and you think that it's a toy exhibition, but it isn't. We talk about hunger in the world. We talk about mistreatment of children," de Alvear said.
"What I'm trying to do with this title is explain to you from the beginning that everything that you see, you should think about it twice. That maybe your pre-established thoughts are not the ones that should be working on there, that you should think about what are the meanings of the things that you see."
The exhibition features dozens of massive, intricate, photorealistic drawings. De Alvear's work is made entirely with colored pencils and paper. That's it. And it looks so real.
I was even scolded by a museum guard for getting too close — an attempt to lean in and hunt for pencil lines.
"When you first see her drawings, you think they must be photographs — or it looks like a photograph of a still life, or maybe a painting like a copy of a still life painting. You absolutely cannot believe that they're drawn in pencil," said Anita Feldman, the museum's deputy director for curatorial affairs and education. "It's kind of unsettling and startling at the same time, you know just how incredibly talented she is in this technique. It doesn't seem humanly possible."
At first, de Alvear's drawings look like traditional still lifes, like a Bruegel the Elder painting.
There's flowers in a vase, insects crawling nearby. Animals strung up. Light glinting on an etched crystal goblet. A feast of crumbled baked goods.
There's a sort of unravelling as you realize that what you are looking at is not a photograph, not a painting. Then, you start to see that the things depicted aren't real in the first place. Lie number two.
They're stuffed animals. Fake flowers. Plastic insects. Toy food.
There's a depth to de Alvear's work beyond the first layer of deception, and Feldman said it's a form of humor.
"It's almost like looking at the values of society and making ironic little statements about them by using stuffed toys and bits of plastic and things — which you don't notice immediately, but you get your eye and you say, oh, no, that's not a real insect. That's actually a stuffed animal. And your first response is to find it really funny. And then she comes through with these other quite darker meanings," Feldman said.
The fake items and toys she draws play a bigger role in understanding the world, she said, whether they represent misinformation, concealed and silent abuse, or the climate crisis. De Alvear wants viewers to think about the dual nature of the seemingly mundane objects, animals and scenes in her work.
"It's also about hunger, about hunger in the world, about the mistreatment in general of the society to other societies which are not from our color, from our flag, from our whatever," de Alvear said. "And also what is the inheritance we are leaving to the future generations? Everything is in plastic. So someday we will not even have those rabbits or those flowers to be able to cook them, because everything would be dead."
One of de Alvear's works, "Two Hares," shows two plush rabbit toys, strung up like freshly hunted kill, ready to prepare for a feast.
Each tuft of fur on the hares — fake fur, that is — is unbelievable. But while a viewer is puzzling over the hyperrealism, there's more at play.
"So actually that is child mistreatment, because what if you kill a stuffed animal? What are you killing? You're killing the innocence to play the game," de Alvear said.
If the 24 still life drawings in the exhibition represent the problems in a society, de Alvear also poses a way out. Two gigantic pencil-drawn galaxies each take up an entire wall in the museum.
Each galaxy contains 50 smaller drawings patchworked together. One galaxy is dark, the other bright. Up close, each swirls with color and light. From afar, it's a reminder.
"One of the things you can do is you can get very far away with your mind, and then your problems are so small that you can just jump over them. And that's the way you can get the distance towards those problems and try to find a solution," de Alvear said.
Though de Alvear's work feels like a distinctly modern twist on still lifes, with modern themes, hyperrealism has been used by artists throughout art history, as has the "tromp l'oeil" technique, or "fooling the eye."
It's a way of inviting the viewer to question reality — different from surrealism but not entirely divorced from it.
SDMA has recently shown other contemporary work that pushes boundaries but also seems to converse or play with art history, including Cauleen Smith's homage to Juan Sánchez Cotán, which is still on view.
"I find seeing something radically contemporary after you've seen old European master paintings is also really refreshing, but they do communicate with each other," Feldman said.
In so many ways, Ana de Alvear's work lures you in for a closer look to unravel some lies. Maybe you're wondering if it's a plastic ant crawling over the pastries. Or a drawing is making you think about world hunger, or innocence lost, or the vastness of the universe.
Or maybe you're looking for pencil lines.
'Everything You See Could Be A Lie' is on view through Sept. 27, 2021 at SDMA. The museum is open for visitors every day except Wednesday.
