The main premises of the art viewing is the ability to trace the separation line between something represented in the image and something existent in reality. The onlooker sooner or later finds the way to find out that the image he is confronting is not a part of reality, but a work of the artist. The basic hint for this is nothing else but substance: media of an image will expose the made-up character of representation showing its material base, like figures in painting eventually show the layers of oil they are made of… But what if the material world betrays the spectator and starts to participate in the act of illusion? More than that, what if Materia starts not only to take part in mimesis but to support the hyperreal image, which while competing with the existent, outruns visual reality and its common representations? In this scenario the block between real and simulated will be breached, the defense system that help us to distinguish “present” from “depicted” will be cracked and the image will be permanently producing fractures in our stable assurance of what is real and what is fake.

“The Cracked Portraits” by Taisuke Mohri take the material base as an accomplice of simulation. Created by pencil face is covered by the layer of glass with cracks in it. The Material Cracks enter the representation producing distinctive and blurry segments of a portrait as if parts of the picture present the face behind the window during rainy day. The Crack in substance becomes The Line in the picture. From another side the hyperreal 3-dimensional head “rushes out” from the flat surface into the mesh of broken glass merging with physical dimension, becoming a part of embodied reality. Mohri’s “Cracked Portraits” and the exhibition we would like to invite you to present this controversial movement and visual/psychotic experience that follows: while depicted with pencil representation is moving towards reality and physical presence, the reality itself and its substance is heading towards the dimension of simulation and realm of imaginary, generating the ungraspable dance of real and illusive and shaking the ways we are used to perceive things.