The Role of Perspective in Contemporary Artistic Practice

PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT Can we obtain scientific knowledge from visual art? This is a quite difficult question to answer. Firstly, a difference has to be made between scientific and non-scientific knowledge. Something we are sure about is that the study of space in art, as well as the representation of space, need a clear scientific basis using mathematics, psychology and optics. In this article, we introduce a great selection of contemporary artists in whose works of art perspective and the representation of space is a crucial issue. After reading, we can clarify the main role that perspective has played in art, and the impact that this fact has on contemporary art. This means that scientific knowledge can be learnt from the study of contemporary art. The artists selected in this article are university educated, and this permits us to grasp the importance given in Fine Arts faculties and schools to reviewing scientific and historical methods.The influence of scientific research in art is not exclusively a contemporary phenomenon. The Alberti model of pictorial representation based on perspective, as well as the social consideration of art, included Painting among the liberal arts because of the mathematical principles of geometry which it was founded on. For more than 400 years, perspective would be called the “science of art” and it established, almost in a unitary way, a representative model that has characterised the artistic production and the training of artists until the fracture represented by the art of the twentieth century. The discussion about the preeminence of the rational model in the artistic practice based on the aesthetic or historicist parameters has been the topic of important debates on teaching and practising the Fine Arts particularly during the age of Enlightenment. Our contribution aims to reflect on the role that perspective has regained in the contemporary artistic practice, not only as a graphic resource for representation but also as a reflective element in itself. Although a hundred years ago for most of the avantgarde movements of the twentieth century it could symbolise a reality to be fought against, its use in contemporary art has transcended from pure methodology to its inclusion among the new conceptual landscapes, intervening as a fundamental part of artistic discourse. Therefore, we will study the work of contemporary artists whose pieces highlight a review of the spatial perspective; so that the threedimensional space becomes a protagonist element of the same representation.Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y UniversidadesMinisterio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidade