Zbigniew Libera: The Flat Reality

Zbigniew Libera’s project refers ironically to advertising photography.

He had worked on it since 2010. He entitled his “work in progress” Reality Is Flat, in which, as Bożena Czubak suggests, one may discern a parallel with the ideas of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French writer, screenwriter and precursor of the nouveau roman. He considered “flattening” vision one of the rudiments of the modern condition and the antithesis of the traditional, pre-modern understanding of depth. Whatever the case, this is also the starting point for Libera’s work, which seeks to demonstrate the truth of the theory of flat reality. To do so, he uses not so much the car as a canonical product of modern culture as its image. Reality is flat, Libera says, because we see it mediated through an image that stereotypes vision. 

If so, what will happen when an attempt is made to restore this image to the three-dimensional reality from which it originated? And how will that restored reality appear? In other words, what will be the result of such a hyper-constructivist conversion?