The paper boy: photographer Thomas Demand

THOMAS Demand treats photography as the final stage in the production of an image that has evolved through a long pre-production phase.

Copyshop (1999) by Thomas Demand

THE large and elaborately staged photographs by Jeff Wall reviewed last year when they opened at the Art Gallery of Western Australia are now at the Ian Potter branch of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne while the NGV International presents, with the concurrent Thomas Demand exhibition, another meditation on the plausible but often deceptive world of the photographic image.

Like Wall, Demand treats photography as the final stage in the production of an image that has evolved through a long and patient pre-production phase but, unlike the Canadian, Demand employs neither actors nor real locations: he takes pictures of environments he has constructed entirely himself, primarily using paper and cardboard. The camera, by registering this ephemeral set from a predetermined viewpoint, completes the illusion in the same way that models come to life in a perspective peepshow.

The exhibition at the NGV begins with a striking contrast between the minimalist and maximalist extremes in the play of illusion. On your left is what appears to be a pegboard, with its regular rows and columns of peg holes; but as you approach you realise it is a print and, moreover, that the rows and columns are slightly irregular. The sense of disturbance, where the eye and the mind expect mechanical predictability, is surprisingly acute.

Immediately facing the visitor entering the exhibition is, on the other hand, what appears to be a photograph of light pouring into a clearing in a wood - except that this is, almost incredibly, all made of paper (270,000 pieces for the leaves, apparently). The exhibition proceeds, after this dramatic overture, to the work for which the artist is perhaps best known, his impassive commercial and industrial interiors.

No work better introduces the work of Demand, its processes and its aims, than his Copyshop (1999). At first sight, this appears to be one of those bland office interiors occupied by a series of large photocopy machines, surrounded by bins and boxes and reams of fresh copy paper. But all of this, of course, is made of paper and cardboard. The illusion is meticulously realised and highly effective, but deliberately not absolute: raking light in the distance captures the slight buckling on the front of one of the machines, clearly and again rather disconcertingly revealing that this is not a sheet of hard plastic or metal but something much more flimsy and ephemeral.

Other interiors reveal different nuances of the work. Thus Vault (2012), as the title implies, purports to show a strongroom in which precious works of art are conserved; many of the pictures for which astronomical prices are paid at auctions today end up in such rooms, seen by no one, because their value makes them too risky to exhibit and too expensive to insure unless they are locked up in this way. Demand's pictures too are invisible, since they are turned towards the wall, and of course they are not real pictures but only dummies made of cardboard. They have labels on the back, but the labels are blank, as are all labels and other such surfaces in these pictures. Demand's world is not only uninhabited by human figures but stripped of the language, numbers and symbols that surround us on every side, distancing the illusion evoked from literal reality.

The absence of words and signs is particularly conspicuous in Shed (2006), which re-creates the building in which Bernardo Provenzano, the notorious Sicilian mafia boss, was finally found hiding in 2006. There is no overt reference to the mafioso, only the precise notation of the cupboard, buckets and what looks like a milk churn, presumably for making cheese. But for all the minute circumstantial detail of this scene, we realise it must originally have been animated by labels and other inscriptions, which have all been stripped away to leave this bland, impassive, spotlessly clean version of itself behind; most noticeable is the lack of hands or digits on the scales in the centre of the composition.

Here perhaps, in this neutralisation of a complex reality, we may sense some hint at the implausibility of the authorities' failure to detect Provenzano for so many decades, while he continued to manage an extensive criminal network through a system of handwritten notes delivered by couriers.

The power of nature to disrupt the artificial world we have built is expressly the subject of the video work Pacific Sun, in which a room tilts from side to side, causing all its furniture to slide into disorder - the camera evidently tilts with the room, however, so the sliding of the furniture appears, even more disturbingly, to happen spontaneously and only the sway of a lamp in the background gives the game away.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that an artist who devotes so much time and care to reproducing the bland and artificial interiors of contemporary life should also spend perhaps even more time producing simulacra of the far more complex environments of nature. The forest clearing already mentioned is a remarkable work, making one think, naturally, of a theatre or film set, but perhaps surprisingly recalling the art of painting more than that of photography. For the kind of time and trouble Demand has taken here is much more commensurate with that of painting such a scene than taking a photograph of it. In the latter case, the subject is given; for the painter, as for Demand, it has to be built up from nothing at all.

Also akin to painting is the ambiguity between the striking effectiveness of the illusion and its self-deconstruction in the visible signs of its own making. In painting, too, illusion is never absolute and indeed the greatest pleasure of painting lies in the equivocation between the painted surface as image and simultaneously as pattern of pigments and brushstrokes: the enchantment is when one becomes the other without ceasing to be itself.

Demand's images of nature employ unexpected artifice to evoke our sense of wonder, reminding us, in his plot of grass for example, how infinitely complex even such a nondescript subject can be. Still more extraordinary, and indeed almost incredible in its complexity, is a vast image of the interior of a cave in Majorca, which has been reproduced using, we are told, more than 900,000 pieces of cardboard, laid horizontally and individually cut to imitate the contours of the cave walls, the stalactites and the stalagmites.

Demand's work is surprisingly low-tech, in the sense that the illusion is produced by building the complex sets by hand, not conjured up digitally on the computer. This is masked, so to speak, by the fact the final works are enormous colour prints on Perspex, but it adds another level to the dialectic of truth and illusion that preoccupies Demand as it must any serious photographer today. In his case, the photographs can claim to be, for what this is worth, absolutely and literally true in their recording of their subject; it is only the subject itself that is entirely illusory and fabricated.

Demand's images are not politically tendentious and they don't preach to us, even if they provoke questions and reflections about the world we live in. Art should make us think, but it should not tell us what to think. And above all it should not be cynical. It is a lazy habit - as I suggested last week - to think that cynicism is a shortcut to truth because cynicism, which so often goes hand in hand with ideology, is a way of closing the mind and dismissing complexity.

Thomas Demand, NGV International, Melbourne,  to March 17