SNP’s word of the day: Photorealism

Word: Photorealism

Meaning: A way of painting based around photographs, faithfully recreating every realistic nuance to create a hyper-lifelike image.

Usage: “Is this photorealism or am I only dreaming?”

You should know it because: The Dries Van Noten show at Paris fashion week was remarkable not only for its mid-century, couture-like cuts (as every critic there noted), but for its prints, so realistic they seemed like a dream. (It’s not an oxymoron if you think about it long enough.) From brilliant cityscapes to lush flora and fauna, the prints—inspired by, and faithfully mimicking, photographs—opened up worlds.

In the late ’60s, Louis K. Meisel discovered a group of extraordinarily realist painters, and coined the p-word to describe their work. It was used for the first time in the program notes of a Whitney Museum show, “22 Realists.” Contemporary photorealism has its best practitioners in Chuck Close, who has continued to produce massive, breath-stopping work despite a paralyzing spinal artery collapse in ’88, and Karel Funk, whose portraits of regular city people are unnervingly lifelike. And it’s not just portraits. One of my new favourite artists is Carly Waito, whose better-than-real paintings of gems and minerals now deck the walls of Narwhal Gallery in Toronto. The subjects are semi-precious, but the paintings seem priceless—and, I think, would make some pretty exquisite Dries prints.

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