The Real of Unreal

In 1933, René Magritte painted The Human Condition. The work depicts a landscape painting in front of a window, placed so that the painting blends into the landscape outside—the real and the fictional worlds fuse. The illusion produced by the work is an allegory for ordinary human life; we live between the real and the unreal and we exist in a world in which these things are both parallel and correlated.

Dutch artists Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács have continued with this motif, bringing the focus of attention to the middle zone between reality and allegory. The landscapes, territories, and materiality that they explore in their work always float between the real and the fictional. Richly metaphorical background themes, cultural materials, and manmade settings create engrossing temporal and spatial experiences for viewers, which abound in information and ways to understand it. As we delve into their works, we are drawn deep into a carefully constructed ecosystem of mediums that involves nature, history, and media and brims with elements that influence and transform one another.

In “The Real of Unreal” Broersen and Lukács “hope the exhibition will create an accessible space between past and present, culture and nature, between the fictional, the mythical, and the real.” In their recent video, music, installation, and digital image works, viewers are situated within a wilderness, a primeval forest, or a cultural ruin formed from the admixture of reality and the digital world. The artists are not satisfied with presenting the uncertainty of reality or offering immersive experiences in fictional realms. The critical consciousness in their work is often hidden behind a depiction of nature, urging us to re-examine the cognitive blind spots and interrelationships between humans, nature, and the manmade world.