John De Andrea brings his unsettling lifelike sculptures to Winfield Gallery.

(photo) Gallery owner Chris Winfield says that people have walked into his gallery and recognized ballerina Shannon Lilly from this sculpture of her. (Walter Ryce)

John De Andrea’s photorealist sculptures are, literally, art imitating life. The style is widely referred to as photorealism, even though that’s more associated with paintings that look like photographs. Terms like hyper-realism and super-realism have also been applied. The illusion of an inanimate object – like a sculpture of a human that seems to be alive – can have a surreal effect on the viewer.

Winfield Gallery in Carmel captures some of that power through two pieces by De Andrea, a terse 73-year-old man now living in Loveland, Colorado, who was one of the pillars of photorealist sculpture in its heyday.

He begins the process by making a mold of his models. He used to pour polyvinyl, but he switched to bronze for its longevity after noting how Greek bronze statues remained intact centuries later. He paints the sculptures, meticulously getting the shades, gradients, blotches and sometimes even scars onto the piece to give them life. He uses real human hair inserted one strand at a time. It can take six months to a year to finish one. The end result can be startling, even unnerving.

De Andrea admits he’s so into his type of creativity that he doesn’t keep up with what’s happening in contemporary art.

“It passed me up,” he says. “I’ve been doing these sculptures for 55 years. When I first did them, they were cutting edge.”

This style of photorealism saw its most incandescent moment in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was part of the hubbub swirling around abstract expressionism (photorealism served as a rejection of such) and pop art (which appropriated photorealism to toy with ideas about mass media).

In the 1970s, De Andrea was a contemporary of Duane Hanson and George Segal, and a friend of Chuck Close (Monterey Museum of Art hosted a big print show of his work). He showed at O.K. Harris Works of Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Venice Biennale. Claus Oldenburg, whose giant Hat in Three Stages of Landing sculptures occupies Salinas’ Sherwood Park, preceded and influenced his explorations of realism; in the ’80s, Jeff Koons revived and sensationalized that brand of photorealism sculpture with his porn-star wife La Cicciolina.

For a couple decades, De Andrea worked in an interesting periphery of contemporary art – sort-of the prog rock of art, highly technical and sometimes inscrutable. Today, De Andrea seems removed from that level of engagement. Maybe it’s all been said before and he doesn’t feel like repeating himself. But maybe he will when he comes to Winfield Gallery for a meet-and-greet this Friday.

“I’m not giving a speech,” he says. “I’ll say hello and goodbye.”

Gallery owner Chris Winfield says De Andrea’s work is currently also being shown at the Denver Art Museum.

“We’re circling back to [photorealism],” Winfield concludes. He says that each of the two pieces he’s showing at the gallery are worth over $100,000.

De Andrea says his sculptures, almost all fully nude, still attract attention because they look so real. Get up real close and the artifice begins to reveal itself, but from an arm’s length away they are eerily lifelike, invoking tension that they’re going to jump and yell at you for staring so intently. We’re not used to staring deeply at people. Here, you have permission to do that, but the feeling of a violation of social protocol goes with it.

“You don’t look at people like you look at a sculpture,” De Andrea says. “We’re in a room and we glance at each other. With a sculpture you can walk around it, take it apart, examine it. That’s part of what makes them appealing.”

De Andrea has sculpted way more women than men. Young, thin, nude women.

“I prefer women. I’m a man,” he says. “You get highfalutin’ theories, but it makes sense.”

One nude sculpture, called Ariel with Drape, stands holding a sheet to her naked body (De Andrea says the sheet isn’t symbolic of anything in particular); the other, Shannon Lilly, a former prima donna ballerina with the San Francisco Ballet, sits resting, clothed in a sheer body suit. Both appear so lifelike (except that Shannon appears to be a bit smaller than human scale) it looks like they will take a breath.

De Andrea says he doesn’t do social commentary – like Duane Hanson, for instance, who shows us our own foibles in his mundane sculptures of tourists, couch potatoes and security guards – but he used to. He did an installation recreating the iconic photo of the Kent State shooting in which a young woman anguishes over the body of a young man shot and killed by the National Guard. Except in De Andrea’s take, everyone is naked in that stark piece. He did a forlorn relationship piece called The Couple in which a woman, who is naked, clings to her man, who is fully dressed and withdrawn. But now is different.

“There is no big theme,” De Andrea explains. “I’m not interested in war. Beauty is what I’m concentrated on.”

John De Andrea’s meet-and-greet is 5-7pm Friday, June 5, at Winfield Gallery, Dolores between Ocean and Seventh, Carmel. Free. 624-3369, www.WinfieldGallery.com