We live in a time when people incessantly document moments from daily reality on ever-handy cell phone cameras, like a reflex action, and when we also have the opposite option to immerse ourselves in the otherworldly, artificial realism of video-games, 3-D movies, and hyper-realistic animation. Realism is readily with us as photographic truth and yet, on another simultaneous plane, now also exists as a mutable and illusory entertainment concept.

Long before the advent of photography and the magic of computer-generated imagery, visual artists fulfilled our desire for lifelike pictures of reality—for windows on the world. How has the technological environment of image-making today shifted the way we, as viewers, read and respond to realism that is rendered painstakingly by hand, in centuries-old artistic media, with a virtuosity that has become quite rare?

Perhaps it is the truer-than-life illusionism or the wizardry of great skill that makes paintings by artists such as Sandow Birk, James Doolin, David Ligare, Masami Teraoka, and Tino Rodriguez among the most beloved works in the San Jose Museum of Art’s permanent collection. This exhibition asks visitors to look more carefully at the allure of style: to closely examine artists’ use of mesmerizing detail and similitude; and to question the interplay between fact and fiction. Just what is the psychology at work behind their sleights of hand?

This distinctly contemporary brand of realism offers anything but a literal rendition of the world. From the magic realism of Rodriguez to the satire of Teraoka, these works move far away from the nineteenth-century academic artistic concept of realism as an objective, unidealized, down-to-earth observation of the world. Although many of these artists are inspired by traditional and often specifically Renaissance painting techniques, they freely morph past, present, and future into hybrid and sometimes wildly metaphorical visions. Here, realism works like a guise, a pretense of reality. It is reassuringly familiar and recognizable, facile for viewers if laborious for the maker. Employed with this purpose, realism can pull us powerfully and with abandon into worlds beyond.

These artists push realism way past its presumed conservatism as an artistic style. They tackle subjects of great currency: identity, myth, environmentalism, gender, and quandaries of science and technology. In the words of the French writer, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau (1889 – 1963), “True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.”