On narrative hypersign and feminine imaginary: Audrey Flack's Photorealism

Abstract

Many theorists of the image do prefer to see in it an ineffable epiphany, a presence or gift for the senses that heralds, above all, the advent of form, colour, texture and the other features of perceptual experience, even when the image refers the world. The paintings in Audrey Flack’s Photorealism series seem to have been conceived by its author to simultaneously confirm and invalidate this hypothesis about the existence of a pure semiotics of the image. Saturated with sensible qualities, they nevertheless constitute a language of visual hypersigns capable of putting together a story, and of constructing an argumentation, about the feminine condition contemporary of its production. That while still wrapping story and argumentation in a pop aura, and in an apparent celebration of kitsch, behind which hides, to better reveal itself to the attentive viewer, a sophisticated inter-artistic and inter-discursive elaboration, that turns them into the thinking and acting devices of a feminism both tender and ironic.