An illusion like this depends on absolute verisimilitude. Mueck's technique is so invisible and so perfect that his figures look begotten, not made. Naturally, you search for flaws — a false skin tone, an obviously man-made follicle — but not to challenge his skill.
It is a more basic compulsion: a coming to terms with the fact that although you know these people are sculptures, some quirk of cognition still insists they are real.
Two characteristic paradoxes are made especially apparent at the RSA. The light flooding down through the cupolas is pitiless, exposing an occasional hard glint in the flesh and yet the figures seem human. Nor does implausible scale ever seem to breach the illusion. Mueck is showing an enormous sculpture of a newborn baby, still sticky with blood, its tiny/huge fists clenched, one eye involuntarily open to the harshness of the new world; and he is showing a miniature figure of the same. Both are profoundly, and equally, moving.
This may be because of the astonishing fact that close up — and this is an art that calls you close — the imitation of reality feels unimpeachably true. But I think it also has to do with the depth and meaning of Mueck's works. There is, for instance, a little naked man seated in the prow of a boat, squinting at something in the distance.
With his calluses and thinning hair, he is as awesomely realistic as usual. But his personality is entirely subordinate to his role as metaphor — adrift, all at sea, embarking on the voyage of life.
Similarly, an outsize woman lies beneath a gigantic duvet, gaze far away, hand to chin like Rodin's Thinker. She is acting a part, performing the concept of reverie, boredom or melancholy; it's hard to tell. But she has no character of her own, whereupon the illusion noticeably wavers.
One of the sculptures here is a huge self-portrait of the artist's sleeping face on its side, a dozing Goliath with a touch of drool about the lips. Walk round it and the hollow mould is revealed, as if to say all this is merely skin-deep. That is the modest reticence that characterizes Mueck's best work, where he creates a figure that seems to have autonomous life and soul; as if he had only helped it into existence and then departed, leaving it to fend on its own.
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