Aug

15

The Eyes Have It.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

August 15, 2007 |

An exhibit currently on display through October 7th, 2007, at the Frist Center For The Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, features the work of ceramic artist and Nashville resident Sylvia Hyman. This is also the year Hyman turns ninety, but she’s still going strong, producing new work, and has, for several years, been producing extraordinary trompe l’oeil sculptures of boxes, papers, string, cardboard, all made out of clay, but so deceptive people are often surprised to touch the pieces and feel the hardness of the material or that tell-tale clink.

There’s a long history of trompe l’oeil painting (a term meaning “fool the eye”). Just check out the book Deceptions and illusions : five centuries of trompe l’oeil painting by Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, the catalog of an art exhibit held at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) in 2002 and 2003 to see some amazing examples. In sculpture it’s not quite so common, and ceramic artists are fairly few in number. That just makes Hyman’s genius even more extraordinary: she stands out in and draws attention to a medium that’s often overlooked. Her playful sense of humor helps: giving works titles like Call A Spade A Spade adds to the interest.

What is it about this sort of art that naturally draws our attention? Hyman experimented with abstraction, but even then her work drew from nature, copying flower petals and shelf fungi. More than two-thousand years ago Plato, in The Republic, criticized artists, primarily poets, but painters as well, for creating a false reality, for creating something that takes us further from reality. Trompe l’oeil painting does that and sculptures like Sylvia Hyman’s do it even more. I don’t think art really takes us further from reality even when it looks so intensely real. It is real, and gives us a greater appreciation for the originals. Everything, including art, is ephemeral, but art is, hopefully, a little less ephemeral. Art teaches us to appreciate what’s here and now by putting it in a form that will last.


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