trompe-l'oeil, a society 4 beautification project
Illusionism runs through Gary Carsley's exhibition 'Trompe-l'oeil', yet not in the style of the photo-realists who ostensibly set out to fool the eye by rendering the appearance of three-dimensionality. Carsley's exhibition is concerned with the art of translation, the deception of space, the erasure of time, and the democratisation of beauty, each a strategy familiar to Carsley's oeuvre. 'Trompe-l'oeil' is comprised of four moments, Trompe-l'oeil paintings, Reverse Meissen sculptural works, Balcony Seen plastic lace and Dollar Art photocopies, each part folded into the whole via coloured fragments of glass that hem the edges of the gallery fioor and walls.
The medium of each set of moments exemplifies Carsley's insistence on the collapse of the hierarchical structures that inform art and its histories. Painting is transgressed with Carsley's airbrush; sculpture is fiattened into thee planes of deception that together relocate the whole; Paddington iron lace is lifted from the foundries of Victorian society and revived via cut-out coloured plastic and photocopied A3 paper works, the later sold as Dollar Art. These multiple mediums and cross-decorative motifs at first confuse the eye and transgress the space, leaving the viewer caught in a momentary state of flux. However, from each of these moments unravels a thread suggestive of the fissure of cultural memory and its impermanent occupation.
The Trompe-/'oeil paintings and the Reverse Meissen sculptural works exist in correspondence with each other, the later the subject of the former. Each Reverse Meissen contains three fiat planes that in total revel a unique floral arrangement primed by the artist from cut fiowers originating from different regions of the globe, and including lotus, orchids, bottlebrush and grasses. Arbitrary oval shapes have been cut from each