Sembra viva! Estetica del perturbante nell’arte contemporanea

Over the last 40 years contemporary art has witnessed an ever-growing, quite enigmatic diffusion of hyperrealistic figures. The power of some particular materials to simulate both the texture and the colour of human flesh has been exploited to create images which elicit strongly uncanny emotions, as they so closely resemble their models that they can easily be mistaken for the models themselves. In the first part of the paper I focus on Edmund Husserl’s analysis of wax figures as a paradigmatic case study of the mismatch between perception and image consciousness. In the second part I briefly recap some salient points of Ernst Jentsch’s and Sigmund Freud’ s reflections on the unheimlich feeling in its relation to imagination and fiction. In the third and last paragraph, I address the question of why certain contemporary hyperrealistic works should be considered as a genuine form of art, whereas ordinary wax figures à la Madame Tussauds – although being materially indiscernible from their much more appreciated counterparts – should not.