There are those like myself, Banksy and many others who work within the rather graphic design orientated side of street, urban and mural art, creating poster-like imagery with the purpose of communicating to as many people as possible in the shortest time available. But not all street art has to work that way, some artists such as the highly respected Netherlands’ muralist Johnny Beerens (born in Breskens, Zeeland 1966) sees the urban landscape from a very different perspective, enhancing the debate on our current reality through his illuminating hyperreal works. His murals are almost photographic to the eye, confusing all who witness his creations and instilling a doubt in their hearts and minds, engaging with them about the nature of our everyday lives and the Newtonian imbalance of probability over possibility.
From Levensbron/Source of Life (1995) which depicts giant drops of water leaking from an old water storage facility (designed by A.J. van Eck in the 1950s in Oostburg, the Netherlands), to his Field of Hope and Love (1998-2000), a mural depicting a field of wheat in a bigger than life scale in the heart of the Heineken Brewery, to the astounding Graan Silo (1997) which has been featured at many graffiti blogs in the past including FatCap.com.
For those not familiar with the theory of Hyperreality, Jean Baudrillard (cultural theorist and writer) proposes that the reality in which we exist has in fact been replaced, at least on an intellectual and philosophical level, by a copy of our world,. Consciously we e seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. Baudrillard’s ideas for hyperreality were heavily influenced by phenomenology, semiotics, and Canadian philosopher and writer Marshall McLuhan. I would take the idea one step further and inject the supposition made famous at the beginning of the classic fiction novel and movie Fight Club, that in fact we are living in a copy of a copy of a copy – although with the hindsight of chaos theoroticians extend that premise to ad infinitum.
I recently had a brief conversation with a pharmacologist in Australia recently, she shares by agnostic theory that all we can believe in is that ‘we don’t know’. Those without the psychological crotch of a firm belief system have a tendency to question the nature of reality, existence and being through a rather scatterlogical process of probabilities and possibilities. We may die and cease to exist, the tunnel of light being nothing more than a final purge of every chemical the brain and body can muster from its vast array of glands. There could be an omniscient and omnipotent being, or perhaps more logically (at such a universal scale) moreover an energy or even space. Alternatively this life and everything in it, on the grand and relative scale of infinity, is nothing but an illusion, collectively or otherwise. I may be but an aspect of your ‘dreaming of existence’ or vice-versa. This theory of doubt is reaffirmed by the human instinct to react with disbelief, in essence ‘shutting down’ or stalling many of their physiological and psychological drives in order to filter input from their sensory organs.
When one is faced by the illusion of exaggerated imminent disaster as with ‘Source of Life’ or the over-proportioned crops featured in ‘Field of Life and Hope’, one can initially only stop and stare. Combining the power of modern realism with the real life context of much of street and mural art, the viewer is briefly taken unawares, enough time in which to reassign their own philosophical values of life and reality as we know it.
Beerens would probably contest my evaluation of his work, many artists of the realist genre perceive what they do as nothing more than that, a depiction of the reality we live in. The contextual nature of his work simply drawing more interest from a wider spectrum of the public than say more traditional mediums such as paintings and their placement within equally traditional contexts such as galleries and expositions. However with the emergence of land art, street art and greater and greater commissions for public art in general, Beerens’ art is gradually opening new avenues for public interraction in the visual arts, beguiling the less informed with a visual extravaganza, whilst encouraging those more adept to question the nature of their reality further than ever before.
Vist Beeren’s site to view his back catalogue of trompe l’oeil murals at www.johnnybeerens.nl.
