For Contemporary Artists, Trompe L’Oeil Is about Much More than Tricking the Eye
In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder recorded a contest of skill between two artists. According to the ancient work, Zeuxis painted grapes so realistic that birds attempted to pluck them from the vine, but when he tried to draw aside the curtain concealing his competitor Parrhasius’s work, he discovered that the curtain itself was the painting: Zeuxis may have fooled the birds, but Parrahasius had fooled his fellow man.
This painterly illusion came to be known as trompe l’oeil, its aim “to deceive the eye through various pictorial techniques and optical effects that allow a visual distraction in which the viewer takes an active part,” explained María Eugenia Alonso, technical curator of “Hyperreal: The Art of Trompe l’Oeil,” which was on view at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid last year. This technique allows the viewer to experience a series of experiences, she said: “from the initial deception to the final discovery that he has been deceived.”
Renaissance artists who knew their Pliny emulated the technique, but it was in 17th-century Holland that trompe l’oeil became an independent pictorial genre that would continue to be cultivated well into the 19th century. Although it then fell out of favor in Europe, it was revived in the same century by North American artists, and continues to be used by artists with varying effects in the 21st century.
We may like to think that we are not as easily fooled as the ancient Greeks, but in the age of AI-created artworks and deep fakes, that’s not necessarily the case. Indeed, artists who are working with trompe l’oeil today are perhaps not trying to deliberately confuse us, but rather encourage us to look carefully at the world around us and question what we see.
Painter Daiya Yamamoto blends the heritage of Flemish masters with the purity of Japanese aesthetics to create exquisite, minimalist works. In a recent solo show at Galerie Taménaga, his photorealistic works often focused on subjects that are not considered conventionally attractive: a gardening tool, or flowers in bud rather than full bloom, for example. Painted as if taped to the canvas or suspended from fine twine, the result is sublime.
In mt masking tape (2020), Yamamoto even succeeds in turning strips of eau de nil masking tape into a work of astonishing meditative beauty. The space around the subject is always a vital part of the composition, giving room to contemplate the objects he has rendered in such remarkable detail and encouraging us to question our preconceptions of what is and isn’t worthy of admiration.
Tape also features in the work of German painter Jochen Mühlenbrink: shiny, brown parcel tape. In a play on the 17th-century tradition of realistically portraying the back of the painting, Mühlenbrink paints his parcel tape holding together sheets of bubble wrap, which appear to be wrapped around a canvas. Elsewhere, it is arranged in random abstract patterns.
In works like WP (2023), part of a recent solo show at Gether Contemporary, Mühlenbrink turns the canvas into a misted window, complete with finger-drawn graffiti; the resulting drips appear to cut through the fogged-up glass as they slide down the pane. They are so phenomenally lifelike that even the artist’s colleagues and gallerists have been fooled, but mere deception is not his aim, he told Artsy—it is the distance between painting and viewer that allows for the suspension of belief that fascinates him.
“Depending on the scale, you have a specific distance when the painting says ‘stop.’ When you come closer you kind of begin to look behind the scenes, you are drawn into the details, but you cannot see the composition in your viewing field anymore,” Mühlenbrink said, noting that to fully appreciate the magic of his works, they have to be seen in person.
Having always considered herself a still-life painter, Josephine Halvorson said that trompe l’oeil eventually “found her.” “As someone painting from life, my ambition has always been to transcribe the experience of being then and there to a painting,” she said. Halvorson’s work includes a series of windows and doors created at the same scale as the architecture of the Villa Medici, where she took part in a residency at the French Academy.
For Halvorson, trompe l’oeil “is not about illusion, deception, or trickery. It’s more about getting to know something, sensitizing oneself to it through proximity, through touch, through looking closely, and through description. In other words, a kind of training ground to see what is real through the simple practice of looking,” said the artist, whose work has been featured in solo exhibitions at ICA Boston and Storm King Art Center. “I found myself getting closer to my subjects to sensitize myself to their surfaces in hopes of discovering the lives embedded in the objects themselves.”
Emerging London-based painter Anne Carney Raines takes a very different approach, using her background in painting theater backdrops to confront the artificiality of the picture plane, as well as, perhaps, our own existence. In interviews, Carney Raines has noted that there is a lot of theater going on in our everyday lives, be it political, on social media, or in the acting out of fake news. In paintings such as Whisky Throttle (2022) or The Duck (2023), she creates dreamlike scenes that the viewer feels almost compelled to reach into.
In its focus on the nature of representation, trompe l’oeil also offers a new way to see other art historical movements. For example, a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art traced the impact of this beguiling technique on Cubism, comparing the ideals and goals of these two traditions. This influence spills over into contemporary artists, too: Cubism is a major influence on Isidro Blasco’s trompe l’oeil constructions that are composed of multiple photographic images of the same space.
Like a Cubist painting in 3D, a work such as Breuer (2018) by Blasco breaks up and reassembles its subject, allowing us to view it from numerous perspectives, which, oddly, can feel more like a realistic experience of perception than a single plane. “You can look at an object and get a lot of different feedback from it. You don’t just see one thing,” Blasco told Artsy. Since our current state of mind and past experiences will always affect how we relate to a place or object, “Cubism reflects a little better what we perceive when we open our eyes,” he said.
As contemporary artists continue to question the aesthetics of realism—and indeed, what is real and what is not—trompe l’oeil is still one of the most vital and compelling techniques in an artist’s toolbox.
