Trompe l'oeil paintings

Trompe l'oeil paintings

Trompe l'Oeil (fr., literally 'defeats the eye') is a manner of painting in which the painted matter appears as objects upon a flat surface which is posited as being the picture plane. Generally, the subjects portrayed tend to be fairly shallow, so as not to project into the viewer's space sufficiently to risk destroying the illusion. Interestingly, it could be argued that trompe l'oeil painting aptly fulfills one of the central tenets of Greenbergian Modernism: that of stressing that the painting is a flat surface, denying the illusion of depth beyond the picture plane, which all painting had aspired to since Alberti first coined this notion in his treatise On Painting in the fifteenth century. On the other hand, it is illusionism of the highest order, and so totally antithetical to Modernism.