"This borderline between reality and fantasy, subconscious and conscious, concrete and illusion pervades these Polaroids".
It comes out of both Surrealism and Expressionism but leaves both behind, and maybe abstraction, too: What, after all, could be more concrete, more illusion free than the visibly fragile material this picture is composed of?
In Carmelo Arden Quin's Trio No 2 and Juan Melé's Irregular Frame No 2, for instance, the idea is to allow the edge of the painting to play a more active role – an attempt to subvert even more thoroughly than other concrete art the illusion of providing a representational "window on the world", an illusion in which the rectangular frame plays a vital part.
Instead, what ends up happening is animals are forced to reside in habitats that are completely foreign to them, including plastic or concrete trees and illusions of real grass or dirt that masks hard concrete below.
The old rooms are still being used because much of the Oral Health Pavilion is an illusion in concrete and glass: only the upper floors of the three-story building are usable.
His installation, Elasticity, uses precisely crafted metal bars and big blocks of concrete to solidify the illusion gracing the Dalston Junction Station in Hackney.
The birds are incredibly detailed, but are scientific illustrations rather than photographs, resulting in an installation that hovers between concrete reality and representational illusion, alluding to both but aligning fully with neither.
It rests not on illusions but on concrete facts that erupt as political and economic chaos, and bitter disappointment for ordinary people.
Grand statements coming out of fancy conferences in concrete jungles are dangerous in that they create an illusion that things will get better.
"The notion that we can hold off pressure from the Hill, in the absence of anything concrete from the Iranians, is an illusion," said Dennis B. Ross, a former senior Obama adviser on Iran.
