{"id":4843,"date":"2020-03-03T01:14:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-03T00:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oriolfontdevila.net\/lluis-hortala-a-literal-trompe-loeil\/"},"modified":"2020-03-03T01:35:36","modified_gmt":"2020-03-03T00:35:36","slug":"lluis-hortala-a-literal-trompe-loeil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oriolfontdevila.net\/ca\/lluis-hortala-a-literal-trompe-loeil\/","title":{"rendered":"Llu\u00eds Hortal\u00e0: A Literal Trompe-l&#8217;oeil"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\t<div class=\"dkpdf-button-container\" style=\" text-align:right \">\n\n\t\t<a class=\"dkpdf-button\" href=\"\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4843\/?pdf=4843\" target=\"_blank\"><span class=\"dkpdf-button-icon\"><i class=\"fa fa-file-pdf-o\"><\/i><\/span> Download PDF<\/a>\n\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p><em>Guillotine <\/em>is an unusual exhibition that seeks to deceive the eye: all the wood artifacts displayed in the installation are engaged in a lavish play on appearances.<\/p>\n<p>Llu\u00eds Hortal\u00e0 (Olot, 1959) attended the renowned Van der Kelen Logelain school in 2014 and 2015 to study the decorative painting techniques that Alfred Van der Kelen established in the late nineteenth century. That is where he learned to imitate the texture of marble, which he now applies masterfully to a set of falsely protruding objects. His goal is to catch the viewer\u2019s gaze and immerse it in a network of tensions and contortions that prompt a certain archeology of the scopic regime based on the actual physical effect on the eye. The trompe-l\u2019oeil allows Hortal\u00e0 to turn the reflection on art and visuality back to a bodily experience through a series of objects which succeed in fooling the eye time and time again \u2013even when the viewer consciously believes to have discovered the <em>trick<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Jean Baudrillard referred to the trompe-l\u2019oeil as <em>a fake of a fake<\/em>, \u201ca simulacrum that is fully aware of play and artifice\u201d <sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_1\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_1');\">(1)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1\">Baudrillard, J. (2011). <em>De la seducci\u00f3n<\/em>. Madrid: C\u00e1tedra, pp. 61-64. (Original French title, <em>De la s\u00e9duction; <\/em>published in English as <em>Seduction<\/em>).<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script>: the trompe-l\u2019oeil catches the eye, interferes with its capacity to compose a place, and dismantles the preeminent position usually held by the gaze. Faced with a trompe-l\u2019oeil, the gaze can no longer impose a vanishing point with which to prevail upon the space, instead being captured to become the vanishing point for the gaze returned by the objects themselves. This is no longer the Cartesian eye, which, spreading its gaze upon the world, thinks and, <em>ergo, <\/em>exists; <sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_2\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_2');\">(2)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2\">The entire philosophy of Descartes stems from a subject with a gaze who finds the basis for his thought in the construction of mental representations of the world. In this sense, Descartes must not only be considered the founding father of modern philosophy, but also of the modern paradigm of visuality. As Walter Ong noted, all of modern individualism can be explained by the equivalence \u201cThe eye = the I\u201d. See Crary, J. (2008). <em>Las t\u00e9cnicas del observador. Visi\u00f3n y modernidad en el siglo xix<\/em>. CENDEAC, pp. 47-96 (Original English title, <em>Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century<\/em>); Jay, M. (2007). <em>Ojos abatidos. La denigraci\u00f3n de la visi\u00f3n en el pensamiento franc\u00e9s del siglo xx<\/em>. Akal, pp. 25-69 (Original English title, <em>Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought)<\/em>.<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script> the subject-facing-the-trompe-l\u2019oeil is actually in the opposite position. The eye is, above all, <em>viewed <\/em>by the object the viewer presumed to view. Therefore, the world of the trompe-l\u2019oeil is a world of pure visuality in which there is nothing to be seen: the viewer\u2019s eye discovers that it is entirely dominated by the gaze of another.<\/p>\n<p>Accordingly, any trace of idealism or of humanistic exaltation evaporates in this exhibition. As Jacques Lacan notes, the trompe-l\u2019oeil does not vie with the world of appearances, but rather with the world of ideas, the <em>Platonic <\/em>world, in which, since ancient times, it has been assumed that every appearance masks an intentionality that transcends the object. <sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_3\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_3');\">(3)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_3\">Lacan, J. (2010). <em>El Seminario. Libro 11. Los cuatro conceptos fundamentales del psicoan\u00e1lisis [1964]<\/em>. Paid\u00f3s, p. 118-119. (Published in English as <em>Seminar XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis<\/em>).<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_3\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_3\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script> However, that does not apply to the trompe-l\u2019oeil, an even more intense reaffirmation of the material agency of the world, yet without its being <em>hyper reality <\/em>either, but rather, as Hortal\u00e0 observes, the trompe-l\u2019oeil \u201cis not more real than the real; <em>it is the real.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_4\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_4');\">(4)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_4\">Conversation with Llu\u00eds Hortal\u00e0. Barcelona, 21-06-2018.<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_4\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_4\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script> The trompe-l\u2019oeil provides us with the expression of the visual deception of visuality in all its literality.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h1>The Museum as a Guillotine<\/h1>\n<p>In the late eighteenth century, the notion of art underwent a decisive change. E. H. Gombrich refers to it when he describes the transition that occurred at the time from the notion of <em>art that must be noble<\/em> to the idea that appeared thereafter, of <em>art that must be sincere<\/em>. <sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_5\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_5');\">(5)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_5\">Gombrich, E. H.<em> (2013). Lo que nos cuentan las im\u00e1genes. <\/em>Barcelona: Elba, p. 196. (Originally published in English as <em>The Story of Art)<\/em>.<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_5\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_5\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script> The trompe-l\u2019oeil technique allows Hortal\u00e0 to intervene violently in this seminal moment in art, in the history of art, and in the scopic regime of modernity.<\/p>\n<p>The transition from an old noble art to a new sincere art came about with the Enlightenment and Romanticism, although consolidating the change required a technology that was highly innovative at the time: the museum. In fact, the Louvre was the first device to allow art to exist beyond any other consideration and thus establish its own law, its <em>autonomy, <\/em>based on which it could develop as if it were a product of nature and in all its authenticity. <sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_6\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_6');\">(6)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_6\">\u201cBeginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, a work of art was expected to be authentic, and achieving that authenticity was only possible through self-definition: its existence had to depend solely on its own laws, much though they may have seemed annoying, offensive, or even unacceptable to the society of their times.\u201d Rofes, O.<em> Art p\u00fablic i producci\u00f3 de localitat<\/em>. [Doctoral thesis defended in 2015, unpublished].<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_6\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_6\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script><\/p>\n<p>Hortal\u00e0 reveals the aseptic \u201cwhite cube\u201d of the Centre d\u2019Art Tecla Sala as heir to this fiction from the very start of the exhibition, when he covers the first wall with a 1:1 scale reproduction of the baseboard from the Museo del Prado. Thus the museum appears established as such: above the prominent baseboard hangs a circular, voluminous piece \u2013<em>Robespierre<\/em> (2017-18)\u2013, alongside what appears to be its preliminary sketch, deceptively framed, and with a painted wall behind it that recreates the color used in the Museo del Prado in 1899 in an attempt to enhance the work of Diego Vel\u00e1zquez commemorating the third anniversary of his birth. Hortal\u00e0 eloquently names the baseboard <em>Guillotine (El Prado) <\/em>(2019), with a nod to Tony Bennet\u2019s suggestion of a correlation between the implementation of the guillotine and the invention of the museum during the same historical period, in his essay <em>The Birth of the Museum <\/em>(1995).<\/p>\n<p>The guillotine was the instrument that provided <em>equal death for all,<\/em> regardless of social rank or class. It introduced a clean, democratic cut that would put an end to the spectacular staging of torment during the Ancien R\u00e9gime. And, although over time it became an icon of the French Revolution, the innovation provided by the guillotine was the possibility of concealing punishment and death from the public eye and ceasing to present executions as a form of social entertainment.<\/p>\n<p>The use of the guillotine spread quickly across early nineteenth-century Europe. However, as Bennet observed, it did not travel these paths alone, but rather alongside the opening of royal and church-owned collections, as well as the institutionalization of the first public museums, which also began to proliferate in the main cities on the continent. Therefore, while the guillotine had rendered the former terror-based forms of government obsolete, the museum had the mission of replacing them according to new social contracts: by admiring art, the people would recognize themselves as part of a universal brotherhood while also empathizing with the State as the sponsor of the museum and of cultural policy. To keep society under control, the State would no longer have to exert coercion or symbolic violence; it would only have to intervene in a matter as subtle as shaping the population\u2019s taste. <sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_7\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_7');\">(7)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_7\">Tony Bennett further elaborated the ideas suggested by Michel Foucault in his <em>Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison <\/em>(1975) regarding the introduction of the guillotine during the Reign of Terror and the development of the modern penitentiary system. Bennet himself acknowledges that his work <em>The Birth of the Museum. History, Theory, Politics <\/em>(1995) analyzes the museum apparatus in strictly Foucauldian terms, given that this philosopher did not actually develop an analysis of museums as part of his archeology of knowledge. An essay that is indebted to these reflections and has also been useful to me for the purposes of this article is Brea, J. L. (2002). \u00abEl museo contempor\u00e1neo y la esfera p\u00fablica\u00bb (The contemporary museum and the public sphere), in <em>La era postmedia. Acci\u00f3n comunicativa, pr\u00e1cticas (post)art\u00edsticas y dispositivas neomediales<\/em>. Centro de Arte de Salamanca, pp. 85-102.<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_7\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_7\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script><\/p>\n<p>The fireplace diptych, the main character in the exhibition, provides an account \u2013in three different times\u2013 of how the transition from a noble art to a sincere art required the intervention of both the museum and the guillotine. In its first appearance, <em>Il y a bien du monde aujourd\u2019hui \u00e0 Versailles<\/em> (2016), the artist places the two fireplace mantels across from each other in a confrontation that personifies the vanity of Marie Antoinette and Madame du Barry: on one side of the room stands the Madame du Barry mantel, in an insulting Bourbon style \u2013voluptuous, almost pornographic, Rococo in all its splendor. The piece replicates the original fireplace from the Salon des Jeux in the palace of Versailles, where this plebeian who had risen broodingly to the status of a countess would sit \u2013whenever she was not in the royal bedroom, where she satisfied the perversions of Louis XV, the lustful king who was enslaved and, ultimately, entirely subjugated to her will.<\/p>\n<p>Right across from it stands the fireplace mantel of Marie Antoinette, the <em>Austrian she-wolf, the Rococo queen, <\/em>also known as <em>Madame D\u00e9ficit<\/em> for her squandering of the public coffers during her rule. This mantel comes from the Cabinet du Billard, which the queen commissioned for her quarters and where she showed a degree of refinement that anticipated the spirit of Neoclassicism. While, on the one hand, this style followed the revolutionary flame of the Third Estate, on the other hand, the courtesans of Versailles embraced it as the new trend that was all the rage.<\/p>\n<p>With <em>Il y a bien du monde aujourd\u2019hui \u00e0 Versailles<\/em>, Hortal\u00e0 alludes to the palatial dispute that arose between Marie Antoinette and Madame du Barry in the early 1770s, revealing the <em>de jure <\/em>power of the then princess and the <em>de facto <\/em>power of Louis XV\u2019s mistress. This tragicomedy, a Versailles catfight with broad repercussions for European geopolitics, ended in victory for Madame du Barry, which led Hortal\u00e0 to make her mantel ostensibly larger than that of the humiliated Marie Antoinette.<\/p>\n<p>Continuing along the exhibition itinerary, the rivalry between the fireplaces is triangulated by the second appearance of a museum baseboard: it is the climax in the narrative, in this case the original baseboard from Room 700 in the Louvre \u2013<em>Guillotine (Louvre) <\/em>(2017-19)\u2013 placed in an elevated position, crossing one of the rooms from end to end. Here, the baseboard does not even function as the representation of a baseboard, but rather as a thin horizon line: the Louvre, the museum that opened up a new world, the first museum in the modern sense of the term. <sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_8\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_8');\">(8)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_8\">Schubert, K. (2000). <em>The Curator\u2019s Egg. The Evolution of the Museum Concept from the French Revolution to the Present Day<\/em>. One-Off Press, p.18.<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_8\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_8\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script><\/p>\n<p>Likewise, Madame du Barry&#8217;s mantel also ceases to be a mere representation of a mantel: it rises and splits in two to escort both flanks of this baseboard-guillotine, which it considers its destiny. It appears to pay tribute to it, although in fact it <em>vanishes. <\/em>The two pieces of furniture converge, through a sophisticated foreshortening, towards the split that will change their status irreversibly: polished weapons to replace everyday courtly squabbles, the princely arsenal had to be strained and twisted into a paroxysm in order to cross the threshold and enter the museum of the Revolution. The trompe-l\u2019oeil placed in perspective probably reveals the extraordinary feat that pieces of decorative art had to perform in order to shed all traces of heteronomy and attend only to their own aesthetic exaltation. The revolutionaries interpreted it as a purge, although by now purification appears as yet another layer of makeup. In the light of the trompe-l&#8217;oeil, the action of the Louvre can only extend Baudrillard&#8217;s account, appearing as <em>a fake of a fake of a fake.\u00a0<\/em><sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_9\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_9');\">(9)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_9\">The contradiction between the values of the Revolution and those of the art from the royal court were the subject of controversy and frequent debate between the members of the Commission du Mus\u00e9um des arts and, later on, of the first Conservatory. Casimir Varon described it clearly in his <em>Rapport du Conservatoire du Mus\u00e9um national des arts<\/em> in May, 1794: \u201cAn involuntary sense of regret interferes with the pleasure of spreading before you our riches; art has diverged far from its true path and celestial origins [\u2026] a multitude of dangerous and frivolous experiments, the results of long centuries of slavery and shame, have debased its nature: wherever one turns one sees that its productions bear the marks of superstition, flattery, and debauchery. Such art does not recount to the noble lessons that regenerated people adores: it does nothing for liberty. One would be tempted to destroy all these playthings of folly and vanity if they were not so self-evidently unworthy of emulation. But nevertheless there is some point in trying to veil these vaults, to obliterate these false precepts. This is our task and we shall strive to achieve it. It is through the overall effect of the collection that this can best be done. It is by virtue of an air of grandeur and simplicity that the national gallery will win respect. It is through a rigorous selection that it must command the public\u2019s attention.\u201d Quoted in McClellan, A. (1999). <em>Inventing the Louvre. Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris<\/em>. University of California Press, p. 113.<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_9\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_9\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script><\/p>\n<p><em>Encore un moment, Monsieur le bourreau, encore un moment <\/em>(2017) provides the last scene in the exhibition: here Marie Antoinette and Madame du Barry are personified at the same scale, equalized in front of a guillotine which, in fact, was the last blow the two women received shortly after the Louvre opened its doors. The title is a quote of Madame du Barry&#8217;s last words, her futile attempt to extend her lifetime when she was already on the gallows. Her request has also been interpreted as the desire for the social theatre of the Ancient R\u00e9gime to live on in time and not succumb to the purge that the Reign of Terror imposed upon all its actors. Be it Louis XV&#8217;s <em>style rocaille<\/em> or the <em>style \u00e0 la grecque<\/em> of Louis XVI, all the ravings of the last decades of the French aristocracy were levelled off according to the same criteria.<\/p>\n<p>In this last scene, however, all the elements seem to have been disassembled. Even the third baseboard in the series \u2013<em>Guillotine (National Gallery)<\/em> (2017)\u2013 is only partially installed at the back of the room. <sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_10\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_10');\">(10)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_10\">The National Gallery, established in 1824, operated under the auspices of the British Museum for a large part of the nineteenth century. The British Museum, founded in 1759, has sometimes been described as the oldest museum in the world, although during its first fifty years it did not act as a museum in the usual sense, instead offering a semi-public collection with limited access, primarily comprising books and manuscripts: \u201cPersons desiring to visit the museum had first to give their credentials at the office and it was then only after a period of about fourteen days that they were likely to receive a ticket of admission,\u201d the German historian Wendeborn regretted in 1785. In historiographical terms, there has been debate as to whether the British Museum and the Louvre constituted two different genealogies in the origins of the modern museum or rather that the notion of the museum as we know it today truly stems from the Louvre, with the earlier British Museum being remodeled according to the French museum\u2019s principles. When Hortal\u00e0 takes the baseboard from the National Gallery and introduces it in his <em>Guillotine <\/em>series, he is clearly leaning toward the latter version. See Schubert (2000). <em>Op. cit.<\/em>, pp. 17-28.<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_10\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_10\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script> The entire epic of the transition from the Ancien R\u00e9gime to the French Revolution appears here as reduced to the effect of a stage set \u2013as if the narrative had ended up being subjected to a theatrical event, as if what had been perpetuated was neither art nor the political ideals of the Enlightenment, but little more than the artifice sustaining them throughout the entire performance.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h1><strong>Towards a <em>Cold Rococo <\/em>(Anachronism and Institutional Materiality)<\/strong><\/h1>\n<p>Hortal\u00e0 chooses a place in the past \u2013Versailles\u2013 and pursues a material strategy \u2013the trompe-l\u2019oeil. The result is a powerful anachronism that enables him to intervene in the present moment and, especially, in the discursive regime with which art unfolds today.<\/p>\n<p>Versailles becomes omnipresent. And, just as Madame du Barry implored at the end of her life, that \u201cVersailles, that marble fortress with one hundred windows, with its curtseys and intrigues and its buttoned-down parties,\u201d that \u201ceternal minuet, with its endless repetition of the same figures,\u201d where \u201ceach and every movement is controlled,\u201d and where people live \u201cfor appearances only\u201d <sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_11\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_11');\">(11)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_11\">The quotes are from Stefan Zweig\u2019s biography of Marie Antoinette, first published in 1932, a source that continues to be thoroughly valid today as a record of the quarrels that occurred in the court of Louis XV and Louis XVI, while also providing a highly complex portrait of Marie Antoinette and a commendably beautiful biographic account: Zweig, S. <em>Mar\u00eda Antonieta<\/em>. Acantilado, pp. 48, 79, 80 and 128 (Originally published in German as <em>Marie Antoinette. Bildnis eines mittleren Charakters<\/em>).<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_11\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_11\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script> did not die entirely under the guillotine\u2019s blade: Hortal\u00e0\u2019s hypothesis is that its world was transferred to the museum and that, even under the guise of presumably democratic sincerity, it has imbued the entire art system and lived on until today. <sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_12\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_12');\">(12)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_12\">As Andrew McClellan explains in <em>Inventing the Louvre <\/em>(1994), the revolutionaries celebrated the opening of the Louvre as part of the festivities for the first anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic, on August 10, 1793. The museum was presented as a symbol of popular sovereignty and as a triumph of the revolution over despotism. Henry Gr\u00e9goire, the priest who became a revolutionary leader, referred to the museum as \u201cthe mold of the Republic\u201d, while Jean-Louis David welcomed the educational role that the institution would have for the people as well as for the artists who put themselves at the service of the Revolution \u2013\u201cThe museum is not supposed to be a vain assemblage of frivolous luxury objects that serve only to satisfy idle curiosity. What it must be is an imposing school.\u201d The museum was celebrated as an appropriation of the royal collection, turned into national property. However, the revolutionaries did not only take over material possessions: a part of this story that is often overlooked is that at some point in the 1770s and 1780s, when the popularity of the crown started to be seriously challenged, the Count of Angiviller proposed to Louis XVI that he open the Louvre to the public and make his royal collection available to the public. With this gesture, the director of the King\u2019s Buildings (<em>B\u00e2timents du roi<\/em>) argued that the king\u2019s magnificence and kindness would be highlighted \u2013and would achieve this aim in a building that was unique in all of Europe. However, the outbreak of the French Revolution put a stop for the progress of this plan.<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_12\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_12\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script><\/p>\n<p>The long-standing technique of the trompe-l\u2019oeil allows Hortal\u00e0 to cross over to both sides of the mirror and keep the world of <em>sincere art <\/em>in tension with its underlying layer of nobility. The contradiction lies in the fact that, although \u201cthese pieces are about falsehood, at the same time, they continue to be authentic\u201d \u2013as Javier Pe\u00f1afiel pointed out to Hortal\u00e0 in a conversation between the two artists. <sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_13\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_13');\">(13)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_13\">Conversation with Llu\u00eds Hortal\u00e0, Barcelona, May 31, 2018. Pe\u00f1afiel\u2019s had visited the artist\u2019s studio a few days earlier.<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_13\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_13\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script> Indeed, Hortal\u00e0\u2019s trompe-l\u2019oeils veer away from their noble predecessors insofar as they do not conceal poor materials nor a society in crisis under their surface, instead containing nothing but a long apprenticeship, painstakingly executed craftsmanship, and, at the same time, an in-depth reflection on visuality and art itself. Therefore, the pieces resulting from this process render Pe\u00f1afiel\u2019s claim reversible and subject to being interpreted in the opposite sense: <em>these pieces are about sincerity, and, at the same time, they continue to be the artifice that art has always been.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Hortal\u00e0\u2019s particular brand of institutional critique stands out for having anachronism as its basis: his work consists of an attack on art and the museum coming from <em>behind. <\/em>Therefore, art and the museum are set against the epistemology that came right before their emergence as such.<\/p>\n<p>Correspondently, an aspect of the Rococo world that imbues Hortal\u00e0\u2019s entire critique is that art\u2019s capacity for intervention is not limited to the realm of discourse. <sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_14\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_14');\">(14)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_14\">If the radical reduction of artistic intervention allowed by ready-mades turned Marcel Duchamp into the father of institutional critique, in Llu\u00eds Hortal\u00e0\u2019s case, given the inordinate amount of work involved in producing each one of his trompe-l\u2019oeils, his production could be considered a <em>Japanese-style <\/em>institutional critique, according to the Spanish urban legend of Japanese strikes that involve working double time to destabilize the economy.<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_14\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_14\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script> The material agency of the artefact is one of Hortal\u00e0\u2019s learnings from that sumptuary period. Therefore, regardless of the meaning that each viewer may attribute to the pieces gathered here, there is no doubt that in each one of them, the trompe-l\u2019oeil will end up checkmating the viewer\u2019s eyes. Following the logic of Rococo procedure, affectation and sensuality always prevail over interpretation and discourse.<\/p>\n<p>Jos\u00e9 Luis Brea used the term \u201cneo-Baroque\u201d in the early 1990s in reference to the ability of conceptual and post-minimalist art to shed its <em>interiority <\/em>and its correlation with meaning, thus gaining the ability to glide effortlessly along the layer of discourse, as if it were a graceful, groundless allegory or a permanent <em>line of flight<\/em>. <sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_15\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_15');\">(15)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_15\">&#8220;It seems obvious that in all the areas of the arts there is an abundance of productions which, from a formal perspective, are asking to be recognized as neo-Baroque<em>,&#8221; <\/em>noted Jos\u00e9 Luis Brea in his first essay, <em>Nuevas estrategias aleg\u00f3ricas <\/em>(New allegorical strategies, 1991). In this Spanish critic&#8217;s opinion, the notion of <em>neo-Baroque <\/em>was a <em>Duchampian find <\/em>that had spread through minimalist and conceptual art. With an eminently textual basis and proceeding from the realm of the discourse, the potential of art to remain in an endless line of flight and in de-identification with any power system was attributed to the allegorical strategy of the Baroque. Several years later, Jes\u00fas Carrillo interpreted this penchant for allegory as indicative of the lack of agency of art in the Spanish context: &#8220;Allegory, as a strategy stemming from a profound consciousness, was not the kind of procedure that typically emerges in a free culture, but a survival mechanism within a system characterized by the precariousness of agency. That is why I dare to consider the &#8216;parallel actions&#8217; led by a large group of &#8216;wise&#8217; critics in the first half of the 1990s as symptomatic of a system that could not summon enough strength within itself to intervene effectively in its environment, but solely through its connection with the structures of power.&#8221; As far as Hortal\u00e0&#8217;s <em>neo-Rococo <\/em>is concerned, we can safely say that it speculates in the opposite direction from that of a <em>line of flight, <\/em>inquiring into the links that art has had with power and as a power, both historically and in the present. See Brea, J. L. (1991). <em>Nuevas estrategias aleg\u00f3ricas<\/em>, Tecnos; Carrillo, J. (2014). \u00abLa instituci\u00f3n y la institucionalizaci\u00f3n de la cr\u00edtica en Espa\u00f1a\u00bb. A: Carrillo, J.; Vindel, J. (ed.). <em>Desacuerdos 8<\/em>. Centro de Arte Jos\u00e9 Guerrero \u2013 Diputaci\u00f3n de Granada; Museu d\u2019Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof\u00eda; Universidad Internacional de Andaluc\u00eda \u2013 UNIA arteypensamiento, p. 252.<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_15\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_15\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script> Hortal\u00e0 also seeks to intervene in the relationship between the signified and the signifier, although in this case the artist chooses to base his exploration on the space below, on the material support of the signified, the <em>signifier, <\/em>while using the excess of artifice as the strategy for collapsing the signified. One could not even claim that it is <em>art for art\u2019s sake \u2013<\/em>a notion that all institutional critiques ended up unmasking as one of the strategies of the discourse<em>\u2013 <\/em>but rather that in Hortal\u00e0\u2019s case we face an even more defiant world, that of <em>artifice for the sake of artifice<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Entering into a dialogue with Brea, I believe we could refer to this excess of artifice as <em>neo-Rococo<\/em>, or a <em>cold Rococo, <\/em>a <em>silent Rococo. <\/em>In fact, applied to Hortal\u00e0, the term Rococo does not only have the quality of a historical or stylistic reference; the artist actually builds upon this apex of aristocratic art to develop a full-blown procedural strategy.<\/p>\n<p><em>Robespierre<\/em>, the first piece in the exhibition, condenses in its circularity Hortal\u00e0&#8217;s entire approach to art and politics: drawing upon all the eloquence that turned him into a charismatic leader, Maximilien Robespierre persuaded the entire population to identify with his political project. Despite the known fact that this attempt to align the whole population with the single discourse of the Republic in absolute terms only succeeded in unleashing the most violent period of the French Revolution \u2013the Reign of Terror\u00ad, during which a vast number of people were purged after being declared enemies of the people, and which, in its grand finale, ended up leading the Jacobin leader himself to the guillotine. With his <em>Robespierre, <\/em>Hortal\u00e0 points out that not only the pristine ideals of the Republic throbbed at the root of the purge: if Robespierre&#8217;s narrative was effective enough to drive over 17,000 French people to their death, it was also due to his ability to captivate with words.<\/p>\n<p>The circularity of <em>Robespierre <\/em>has more to do with the ubiquity of artifice than with the wheel of time or the notion of an endless return. Robespierre&#8217;s feet were always firmly grounded on the mosaic with which the architect Bernardino Maccarucci decorated the floors of the Gallerie dell&#8217;Academia in Venice the same decade of the revolutionary&#8217;s birth: a compass rose turned into an ornament, the hypnotic base on which the roadmap unfolds, the scopic drive that is incessantly replicated with the will to power and which reemerges in every instance of domination. <sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_16\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_reference_16');\">(16)<\/sup><span class=\"footnote_tooltip\" id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_16\">In a footnote to <em>Civilization and Its Discontents <\/em>(1930), Sigmund Freud associated what Jacques Lacan would later refer to as <em>scopic drive <\/em>with the moment when humans stood upright and set out to walk on two feet. Adopting a vertical position could be related to the urge to dominate one&#8217;s environment, which resulted in the sense of sight replacing the formerly preponderant sense of smell. Sight, <em>the noblest of senses<\/em>, was thus intimately connected thereafter to the human will to power. I owe this reference and the interpretation of the passage to Ruben Verd\u00fa. Freud, S. (2001). <em>El malestar en la cultura y otros ensayos<\/em>. Madrid: Alianza, p. 251. (Original German, <em>Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, <\/em>published in English as <em>Civilization and Its Discontents<\/em>).<\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tjQuery(\"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_16\").tooltip({\t\ttip: \"#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_16\",\t\ttipClass: \"footnote_tooltip\",\t\teffect: \"fade\",\t\tfadeOutSpeed: 100,\t\tpredelay: 400,\t\tposition: \"top right\",\t\trelative: true,\t\toffset: [10, 10]\t});<\/script><\/p>\n<p><em>Robespierre <\/em>is a <em>vanitas<\/em> of the ideals of the Revolution: <em>artifice you are and to artifice you shall return. <\/em>Beneath the dream of transparent politics viewed as the direct will of the people, there will always be an underlying rhetoric, the mediation of artifice and of enchantment, sensuous beauty, and a considerable dose of eroticism, with which, ultimately, the courtesan world of the Ancien R\u00e9gime was identified, and which we have not succeeded in shedding ever since.<\/p>\n<div class=\"footnote_container_prepare\">\t<p><span onclick=\"footnote_expand_reference_container();\">Notes:<\/span><span style=\"display: none;\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;[ <a id=\"footnote_reference_container_collapse_button\" style=\"cursor:pointer;\" onclick=\"footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container();\">+<\/a> ]<\/span><\/p><\/div><div id=\"footnote_references_container\" style=\"\">\t<table class=\"footnote-reference-container\">\t\t<tbody>\t\t<tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_1\">1.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_1');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">Baudrillard, J. (2011). <em>De la seducci\u00f3n<\/em>. Madrid: C\u00e1tedra, pp. 61-64. (Original French title, <em>De la s\u00e9duction; <\/em>published in English as <em>Seduction<\/em>).<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_2\">2.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_2');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">The entire philosophy of Descartes stems from a subject with a gaze who finds the basis for his thought in the construction of mental representations of the world. In this sense, Descartes must not only be considered the founding father of modern philosophy, but also of the modern paradigm of visuality. As Walter Ong noted, all of modern individualism can be explained by the equivalence \u201cThe eye = the I\u201d. See Crary, J. (2008). <em>Las t\u00e9cnicas del observador. Visi\u00f3n y modernidad en el siglo xix<\/em>. CENDEAC, pp. 47-96 (Original English title, <em>Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century<\/em>); Jay, M. (2007). <em>Ojos abatidos. La denigraci\u00f3n de la visi\u00f3n en el pensamiento franc\u00e9s del siglo xx<\/em>. Akal, pp. 25-69 (Original English title, <em>Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought)<\/em>.<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_3\">3.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_3');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">Lacan, J. (2010). <em>El Seminario. Libro 11. Los cuatro conceptos fundamentales del psicoan\u00e1lisis [1964]<\/em>. Paid\u00f3s, p. 118-119. (Published in English as <em>Seminar XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis<\/em>).<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_4\">4.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_4');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">Conversation with Llu\u00eds Hortal\u00e0. Barcelona, 21-06-2018.<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_5\">5.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_5');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">Gombrich, E. H.<em> (2013). Lo que nos cuentan las im\u00e1genes. <\/em>Barcelona: Elba, p. 196. (Originally published in English as <em>The Story of Art)<\/em>.<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_6\">6.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_6');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">\u201cBeginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, a work of art was expected to be authentic, and achieving that authenticity was only possible through self-definition: its existence had to depend solely on its own laws, much though they may have seemed annoying, offensive, or even unacceptable to the society of their times.\u201d Rofes, O.<em> Art p\u00fablic i producci\u00f3 de localitat<\/em>. [Doctoral thesis defended in 2015, unpublished].<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_7\">7.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_7');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">Tony Bennett further elaborated the ideas suggested by Michel Foucault in his <em>Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison <\/em>(1975) regarding the introduction of the guillotine during the Reign of Terror and the development of the modern penitentiary system. Bennet himself acknowledges that his work <em>The Birth of the Museum. History, Theory, Politics <\/em>(1995) analyzes the museum apparatus in strictly Foucauldian terms, given that this philosopher did not actually develop an analysis of museums as part of his archeology of knowledge. An essay that is indebted to these reflections and has also been useful to me for the purposes of this article is Brea, J. L. (2002). \u00abEl museo contempor\u00e1neo y la esfera p\u00fablica\u00bb (The contemporary museum and the public sphere), in <em>La era postmedia. Acci\u00f3n comunicativa, pr\u00e1cticas (post)art\u00edsticas y dispositivas neomediales<\/em>. Centro de Arte de Salamanca, pp. 85-102.<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_8\">8.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_8');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">Schubert, K. (2000). <em>The Curator\u2019s Egg. The Evolution of the Museum Concept from the French Revolution to the Present Day<\/em>. One-Off Press, p.18.<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_9\">9.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_9');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">The contradiction between the values of the Revolution and those of the art from the royal court were the subject of controversy and frequent debate between the members of the Commission du Mus\u00e9um des arts and, later on, of the first Conservatory. Casimir Varon described it clearly in his <em>Rapport du Conservatoire du Mus\u00e9um national des arts<\/em> in May, 1794: \u201cAn involuntary sense of regret interferes with the pleasure of spreading before you our riches; art has diverged far from its true path and celestial origins [\u2026] a multitude of dangerous and frivolous experiments, the results of long centuries of slavery and shame, have debased its nature: wherever one turns one sees that its productions bear the marks of superstition, flattery, and debauchery. Such art does not recount to the noble lessons that regenerated people adores: it does nothing for liberty. One would be tempted to destroy all these playthings of folly and vanity if they were not so self-evidently unworthy of emulation. But nevertheless there is some point in trying to veil these vaults, to obliterate these false precepts. This is our task and we shall strive to achieve it. It is through the overall effect of the collection that this can best be done. It is by virtue of an air of grandeur and simplicity that the national gallery will win respect. It is through a rigorous selection that it must command the public\u2019s attention.\u201d Quoted in McClellan, A. (1999). <em>Inventing the Louvre. Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris<\/em>. University of California Press, p. 113.<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_10\">10.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_10');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">The National Gallery, established in 1824, operated under the auspices of the British Museum for a large part of the nineteenth century. The British Museum, founded in 1759, has sometimes been described as the oldest museum in the world, although during its first fifty years it did not act as a museum in the usual sense, instead offering a semi-public collection with limited access, primarily comprising books and manuscripts: \u201cPersons desiring to visit the museum had first to give their credentials at the office and it was then only after a period of about fourteen days that they were likely to receive a ticket of admission,\u201d the German historian Wendeborn regretted in 1785. In historiographical terms, there has been debate as to whether the British Museum and the Louvre constituted two different genealogies in the origins of the modern museum or rather that the notion of the museum as we know it today truly stems from the Louvre, with the earlier British Museum being remodeled according to the French museum\u2019s principles. When Hortal\u00e0 takes the baseboard from the National Gallery and introduces it in his <em>Guillotine <\/em>series, he is clearly leaning toward the latter version. See Schubert (2000). <em>Op. cit.<\/em>, pp. 17-28.<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_11\">11.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_11');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">The quotes are from Stefan Zweig\u2019s biography of Marie Antoinette, first published in 1932, a source that continues to be thoroughly valid today as a record of the quarrels that occurred in the court of Louis XV and Louis XVI, while also providing a highly complex portrait of Marie Antoinette and a commendably beautiful biographic account: Zweig, S. <em>Mar\u00eda Antonieta<\/em>. Acantilado, pp. 48, 79, 80 and 128 (Originally published in German as <em>Marie Antoinette. Bildnis eines mittleren Charakters<\/em>).<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_12\">12.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_12');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">As Andrew McClellan explains in <em>Inventing the Louvre <\/em>(1994), the revolutionaries celebrated the opening of the Louvre as part of the festivities for the first anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic, on August 10, 1793. The museum was presented as a symbol of popular sovereignty and as a triumph of the revolution over despotism. Henry Gr\u00e9goire, the priest who became a revolutionary leader, referred to the museum as \u201cthe mold of the Republic\u201d, while Jean-Louis David welcomed the educational role that the institution would have for the people as well as for the artists who put themselves at the service of the Revolution \u2013\u201cThe museum is not supposed to be a vain assemblage of frivolous luxury objects that serve only to satisfy idle curiosity. What it must be is an imposing school.\u201d The museum was celebrated as an appropriation of the royal collection, turned into national property. However, the revolutionaries did not only take over material possessions: a part of this story that is often overlooked is that at some point in the 1770s and 1780s, when the popularity of the crown started to be seriously challenged, the Count of Angiviller proposed to Louis XVI that he open the Louvre to the public and make his royal collection available to the public. With this gesture, the director of the King\u2019s Buildings (<em>B\u00e2timents du roi<\/em>) argued that the king\u2019s magnificence and kindness would be highlighted \u2013and would achieve this aim in a building that was unique in all of Europe. However, the outbreak of the French Revolution put a stop for the progress of this plan.<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_13\">13.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_13');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">Conversation with Llu\u00eds Hortal\u00e0, Barcelona, May 31, 2018. Pe\u00f1afiel\u2019s had visited the artist\u2019s studio a few days earlier.<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_14\">14.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_14');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">If the radical reduction of artistic intervention allowed by ready-mades turned Marcel Duchamp into the father of institutional critique, in Llu\u00eds Hortal\u00e0\u2019s case, given the inordinate amount of work involved in producing each one of his trompe-l\u2019oeils, his production could be considered a <em>Japanese-style <\/em>institutional critique, according to the Spanish urban legend of Japanese strikes that involve working double time to destabilize the economy.<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_15\">15.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_15');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">&#8220;It seems obvious that in all the areas of the arts there is an abundance of productions which, from a formal perspective, are asking to be recognized as neo-Baroque<em>,&#8221; <\/em>noted Jos\u00e9 Luis Brea in his first essay, <em>Nuevas estrategias aleg\u00f3ricas <\/em>(New allegorical strategies, 1991). In this Spanish critic&#8217;s opinion, the notion of <em>neo-Baroque <\/em>was a <em>Duchampian find <\/em>that had spread through minimalist and conceptual art. With an eminently textual basis and proceeding from the realm of the discourse, the potential of art to remain in an endless line of flight and in de-identification with any power system was attributed to the allegorical strategy of the Baroque. Several years later, Jes\u00fas Carrillo interpreted this penchant for allegory as indicative of the lack of agency of art in the Spanish context: &#8220;Allegory, as a strategy stemming from a profound consciousness, was not the kind of procedure that typically emerges in a free culture, but a survival mechanism within a system characterized by the precariousness of agency. That is why I dare to consider the &#8216;parallel actions&#8217; led by a large group of &#8216;wise&#8217; critics in the first half of the 1990s as symptomatic of a system that could not summon enough strength within itself to intervene effectively in its environment, but solely through its connection with the structures of power.&#8221; As far as Hortal\u00e0&#8217;s <em>neo-Rococo <\/em>is concerned, we can safely say that it speculates in the opposite direction from that of a <em>line of flight, <\/em>inquiring into the links that art has had with power and as a power, both historically and in the present. See Brea, J. L. (1991). <em>Nuevas estrategias aleg\u00f3ricas<\/em>, Tecnos; Carrillo, J. (2014). \u00abLa instituci\u00f3n y la institucionalizaci\u00f3n de la cr\u00edtica en Espa\u00f1a\u00bb. A: Carrillo, J.; Vindel, J. (ed.). <em>Desacuerdos 8<\/em>. Centro de Arte Jos\u00e9 Guerrero \u2013 Diputaci\u00f3n de Granada; Museu d\u2019Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof\u00eda; Universidad Internacional de Andaluc\u00eda \u2013 UNIA arteypensamiento, p. 252.<\/td><\/tr><tr>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_index\"><span id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_16\">16.<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_link\"><span onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor('footnote_plugin_tooltip_16');\">&#8593;<\/span><\/td>\t<td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">In a footnote to <em>Civilization and Its Discontents <\/em>(1930), Sigmund Freud associated what Jacques Lacan would later refer to as <em>scopic drive <\/em>with the moment when humans stood upright and set out to walk on two feet. Adopting a vertical position could be related to the urge to dominate one&#8217;s environment, which resulted in the sense of sight replacing the formerly preponderant sense of smell. Sight, <em>the noblest of senses<\/em>, was thus intimately connected thereafter to the human will to power. I owe this reference and the interpretation of the passage to Ruben Verd\u00fa. Freud, S. (2001). <em>El malestar en la cultura y otros ensayos<\/em>. Madrid: Alianza, p. 251. (Original German, <em>Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, <\/em>published in English as <em>Civilization and Its Discontents<\/em>).<\/td><\/tr>\t\t<\/tbody>\t<\/table><\/div><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\tfunction footnote_expand_reference_container() {\t\tjQuery(\"#footnote_references_container\").show();        jQuery(\"#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button\").text(\"-\");\t}    function footnote_collapse_reference_container() {        jQuery(\"#footnote_references_container\").hide();        jQuery(\"#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button\").text(\"+\");    }\tfunction footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container() {\t\tif (jQuery(\"#footnote_references_container\").is(\":hidden\")) {            footnote_expand_reference_container();\t\t} else {            footnote_collapse_reference_container();\t\t}\t}    function footnote_moveToAnchor(p_str_TargetID) {        footnote_expand_reference_container();        var l_obj_Target = jQuery(\"#\" + p_str_TargetID);        if(l_obj_Target.length) {            jQuery('html, body').animate({                scrollTop: l_obj_Target.offset().top - window.innerHeight\/2            }, 1000);        }    }<\/script>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Download PDF Guillotine is an unusual exhibition that seeks to deceive the eye: all the wood artifacts displayed in the installation are engaged in a lavish play on appearances. Llu\u00eds Hortal\u00e0 (Olot, 1959) attended the renowned Van der Kelen Logelain school in 2014 and 2015 to study the decorative painting techniques that Alfred Van der [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4870,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-escriptor","any-2019-ca","clients-centre-dart-tecla-sala"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Llu\u00eds Hortal\u00e0: A Literal Trompe-l&#039;oeil - Oriol Fontdevila<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Text published in the catalog of the exhibition Llu\u00eds Hortal\u00e0: Guillotina held in Centre d&#039;Art Tecla Sala on May 2019.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/oriolfontdevila.net\/ca\/lluis-hortala-a-literal-trompe-loeil\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"ca_ES\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Llu\u00eds Hortal\u00e0: A Literal Trompe-l&#039;oeil - 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