When Galileo first saw the rings of Saturn through his telescope, he thought they were ears and made three pictures according to his perception. Of course, with a bad telescope they may seem so, even with a better one if we do not know in advance what we are looking at, and nothing “a priori” pushes us to think that there may be rings around a planet. In fact, these are not rings like the ones we put on our fingers, but rather pieces of matter (ranging from centimeters to 10 meters in length) that orbit the equatorial plane of the planet, and that from a certain distance can be described, in a vague way, as rings. Every time we perceive an object, we complete its form with information that we have in our memory and our experience, an experience that is poorly adapted to too short or too long time intervals, to too large or too small spaces. Our realm is the medium dimensions (life-related) and the approximations, or to be more precise, the limited world of human cultures, not without grandiloquent speeches and representations.
What are we talking about when we say the word "realism" in relation to painting? Physicist Niels Bohr believed that the way in which cubism represented objects corresponded more to physical reality than traditional ways of representing them. The simultaneity of perspectives of the cubist representation as formulated by Metzinger found its way into the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics and inspired his models of the atom. However, neither Cubism nor traditional academic painting does anything other than representing a culturally and physiologically conditioned myth that we call “objects of perception”. Only in our concept is there the possibility of a total representation of an object, since we cannot represent the parts of the object that are hidden from our point of view due to their three-dimensional composition; moreover, even if they weren't, we would never exhaust the number of possible perspectives of that object. The object does not exist independently of its observer, of the Spatio-temporal and cultural conditioning that configure its psyche. This postulate constituted the aesthetic starting point of a long list of painters since the beginning of the 20th century and reached its majority in American Abstract Expressionism and European Informalism. Thus, for example, Rothko and Gottlieb not only denied that the world had objective appearances that exist outside the representations that the subject makes of them (something that had already been theoretically treated in the First Kantian Critique), but that visual perception is not but an element within the totality of aesthetic experience that does not take precedence over feelings and thoughts.
Contemporary neuroscience tells us that even something as basic as the perception of the size of a figure is affected by the emotional state of the subject. What we call reality is the constructive result of a myth, the projection of a psychological space on another space that we call physical. The correspondence between the representation on a surface and a three-dimensional appearance is not an isomorphism, is not an exact correspondence of a given structure upon another. To what extent do we say that such a map (morphism) is realistic? To the extent that it produces a three-dimensional appearance, and we consider more real that phantasmagoria that is more indistinguishable from a three-dimensional perceptual representation. From the second and third decades of the European XV century on, the precision to construct these illusionisms was considered as an artistic scale of the value of a painting. It is true that works from the past were not only valued for their skill in creating an illusion through chiaroscuro and perspective, but also for the expressive aesthetic content they achieved in the representation of a myth (Christian, pagan, or of political and social life in general), but that aesthetic content was never independent (since the Renaissance) of skill in illusionistic representation.
We have called realism in painting precisely the illusionist constructions that reproduce the appearances of perception, in the same way that we have called realism in literature to certain linguistic constructions that use the myths of everyday life as material. The obsession with a meticulous reproduction of the appearances of the plastic arts has had a parallel path to that of science itself: the control of experience is the control of life and is an objective per se of human action. In the Renaissance, optics and perspective did not have an independent delimitation as sciences, as we observed in Leonardo, that is, there was the belief in an objective way of being of things that gave the foundation for the illusionism of art, an art which can asymptotically (given infinite time) approach such reality, like science itself. We could summarize the belief in this postulate: there is a single reality that science discovers, and to which art gives a sensible form.
Our high definition television screens are the present result of a process that traveled the paths of painting and chemical photography. We reproduce with higher and higher quality the illusion of perception. Consider for a moment Hockney-Falco's thesis on the use of optical constructions (camera obscura and camera lucida) in all Western paintings from the 15th century onwards, optical devices that were used to fit works, specify shadows and perspective, and reproduce in detail the objects. It is interesting that such a thesis, which merely states a simple technical fact of the art of painting, has received such virulent attacks by a significant sector of the art world, attacks that only show the fetishism of naive (“hiper”) realism (or shall we say hiper-illusionism?) that gravitates on a good number of works that hang in our museums.
It makes little sense to call the detailed production of an illusion realistic. In fact, the concept of reality is so loaded with inherited and imperceptible metaphysical assumptions that it hardly makes sense outside of closed cultural contexts, of particular mythical frameworks. Are cells real? Four centuries ago they weren't, and nobody painted them, despite being there all the time. Are angels real in the same sense that a table is real? The so-called realistic painting is full of them. The painting represents myths, symbolic constructions, and the entire technical process is already a symbolic construction: the material has no meaning per se. Even the so-called materiality of color is still a metaphor for a pre-interpretation of perceptual experience already conditioned to a level prior to that of our homo sapiens species. The visual cells that receive light (unreal until not long ago), the cones, are sensitive to blue, red and green, a trichrome combination that seems to be especially useful for the arboreal life of primates, with them we perceive around 10 million colors, but there are animals (some birds and insects) that have pentachromia and can see up to 10 billion colors. Is our representation of some flowers realistic then compared to the visual perception that a butterfly has of them? Do affirmations of neorealism make sense, such as: putting "the real in front of our eyes in the diverse aspects of its expressive totality", or saying that there are representations that put the entire reality before us?
Realism in painting is a subcategory of figurative representation, whose roots are deeper since they connect with the physiological conditions for the perception of forms on the one hand and with the developments of the general capacity for symbolization on the other. Since the long-gone eras of the caves, humans have painted both abstract figures and figures that represent objects of everyday life. Genevieve von Petzinger has distinguished 26 signs that were used worldwide in pictorial representations and prints. Interestingly, in some cases, the antiquity of geometric figures far precedes animal paintings, as in the representations of Blombos (South Africa) of 75,000 years ago. In this sense, the pictorial representations of the abstract figurative precede those of the natural figurative. The painting of the 20th century fuses the abstract figurative with the natural figurative. In some cases, as in cubism, interpreting the objects of everyday life from a non-Euclidean geometry, in others, as in Kandinski, through a new re-symbolization (esoteric spiritual in his case) of the natural figure, or also in others cases, as in Malevich, through the reabsorption of geometry and the natural world in aesthetics of feeling. Thus, from the suprematist point of view, the painting of Raphael or Rembrandt has the value of the feeling that originated it, while from a realist point of view, only the virtuosity of objective representation would be admired.
Is it having a name that makes a figure concrete and not abstract? A name fixes an appearance as an object, but to the simplest objects of Euclidean geometry (triangle, square, etc.), which have names and are ideal, we do not tend to consider them as concrete objects but as abstractions of forms whose similarities we can perceive in nature. On the other hand, an amorphous rock is something concrete from the moment we identify it as a rock, or a nebula when we identify it with a more or less chaotic expansion of a specific gas. But the distinction between form (as a concrete figure) and amorphous (as an abstract figure) is not as simple as it might seem. We say that something is amorphous when it does not have a defined structure according to a simple, logical, or geometric pattern, however, something that may seem amorphous to us, such as the figure of the sea coast, can be composed in a very precise and orderly way by means of a fractal, that is, with the recursive construction of a self-similar object. Therefore, any definition of the concepts "figurative" and "non-figurative", as Piet Mondrian understood, can only be relative, and since realism defines itself as figurative, the very concept of pictorial realism only makes sense when we "abstract" the complexity of the world and call a familiar set of representations real.
When are two pictorial figures similar to each other, whether we call them concrete or abstract? The similarity in painting is more topological than geometric. From a topological point of view, a coffee cup is the same structure as a donut: if we build one of these shapes with a plastic material, we can continuously deform it into the other. Analogously, pictorial similarities (in the broadest sense of representations on surfaces) are a kind of cultural topology: the figure of a totem resembles an animal or an idea if we have the necessary keys for our perception to make the topological transformation, that is, if the animal or the idea is known to us and if the processes of abstraction that every topological transformation implies are familiar to us.
In general, all the avant-gardes have spoken of reality in relation to their own production and aesthetic axioms. Thus, for the Cubism of Metzinger and Gleizes, Cézanne's work supposes a plunge into the deepest reality, the reality in which Cubist painting wants to immerse itself by showing true relationships between things. For its part, surrealism argued that its representations expressed a reality superior to the ordinary, showing something like the structure of the real, and its production ultimately rested on the pair of opposites "real-imaginary" dissolving it in the aesthetic experience. For Brancusi (Platonist in this sense) his work was not abstract but realistic, since not the external form, but his idea, was real. And it is inevitable that an ontological category such as "the real" is always present in any reflective aesthetic action. We can speak of the "reality of the artist", as Rothko did, as long as we do not forget the metaphorical content of the expression, which only designates the philosophical, scientific, and artistic myths through which he/she thinks and feels his/her life experience. If we insist on calling real “that something that our myths take as the matter of their constructions”, we can only say that the real is above all a mystery, or better, an Apeiron, something indeterminate that only takes shape in the process of making it alive in our aesthetic action.
