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Keywords:

A trick of the eye

Forced perspective 

The common visual experience of space

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• Trompe-l'œil is an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions. A typical trompe-l'œil mural might depict a window, door, or hallway, intended to suggest a larger room in the building.

• A famous example is a contest between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Parrhasius asked Zeuxis to judge one of his paintings that were behind a pair of tattered curtains in his study. Parrhasius asked Zeuxis to pull back the curtains, but when Zeuxis tried, he could not, as the curtains were included in Parrhasius's painting—making Parrhasius the winner. 'For Lacan, Parrhasius's theatrical device proved not a mastery of technical means(a trap for the gaze) but rather a successful trompe-l'œil, an eye-trick, which brought the subject's unconscious gaze to light. [1]

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                       The Reverse of a Framed Paintin, by Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts1670

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The work has already been called "the most radical meditation about painting as an object and as an image" and is interpreted as an early example of conceptual art.[4]

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Trompe-l'œil has appeared in many contemporary artworks. In the work of Daniel Sinsel, the source of raw materials， such as boxes, glass and nuts points to a fundamental interest in the physical, visual and emotional effects of painting—and how objects can affect and activate pictorial space. Instead of presenting narratives, he attempts to allude to emotion and recalls an experience by depicting folds, twists and containers in a refined way to the viewers.

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But in a lot of contemporary art, the artist doesn't want to trick the viewer by creating an illusion. They attempt to form a self-contradictory space in the painting space to create a sense of absurdity.

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These artists create different material textures within the flat space of the painting in order to enhance the visual interactivity and playfulness of the image.

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Books and other resources

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[1] Jacques Lacan, 'La ligne et la lumière", in Le séminaire XI: les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la
psychanalyse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973) 95

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