The rich fabrics are real enough, lovingly installed by the vehicles’ proud owners, but the deception starts here. Burberry? Gucci? Stephen Sprouse? No, knock-offs. Real vistas out those windows? Well, yes, but transplanted thousands of miles. Have we perhaps already arrived in postpostmodern Paradise, where vehicle owners appropriate logos and artists appropriate vehicle owners? “There’s a double meaning,” admits Gispert, and it’s there in the series title, Decepcion.
Text by William A Ewing
Luis Gispert sees his work situated at an intersection of certain arcane aesthetic ideals, notions of the constructed photographic image, and an interest in concepts of the picturesque and sublime in landscape photography. Unlike a number of his fellow artists, however, he has no interest in a seamless weave; on the contrary, it’s the rough seams that give the work its vigour. Gispert puts the viewer in the back seat of richly upholstered cars or trucks and takes us off on a ride through the Californian desert and the Grand Tetons. Or so it would appear. It’s hard not to think of these interiors as a video game, but fact is stranger than fiction, and facts they are – of a kind.