Yeah, surely they would. Children are impressed quite easily. And even when you’re an adult, a lot of simple things look amazing when you don’t have an understanding of what’s behind it all.

Casas simply traces photos in a very direct/unthinking way. If you understood his technique – which would take no more ‘mastery’ than it does to learn to drive – you could create work interchangeable with his.

It’s just photos projected onto paper and then filled in with a pen using simple cross-hatching. The works are huge, like 10 – 12 foot tall, and so when you see them on the computer they’re shrunken down an incredible lot and look like photos, the imperfections disappear and a false delicateness comes about. Search his name with Google Images though, and restrict to ‘LARGE’ results, and you can see something closer to the reality of them. You can see very clearly that’s its pen and the scribbling lines and whatnot are plainly there. When seen in person there’s no way you’d mistake any of them for photos.

These works are empty, I think, just a gimmick. Take away the BIC pen and what do you have? It certainly took effort to create the work, I don’t deny that, but still all it is transferring/copy a photo to paper with elementary technique. There’s no idea there, no feeling, no nothing, just a gimmick and a cold display of technique.