From Deception to Insight The Trompe L’oeil as a Critical Visual Strategy

This research is fundamentally grounded in the art practice of trompe l’oeil painting itself. At the start of the research, I began with painterly copying two trompe l’oeil masterpieces (Reverse of a Framed Painting (1670-72) by Cornelius Gijsbrechts and Blattecke (1967) by Gerhard Richter) in order to try to fully understand every aspect of them and to approach the position of the original artist as close as possible.

Next to that I started investigating possibilities of trompe l’oeil painting within my own practice as a contemporary painter. Sometimes I bumped into boundaries which could turn the trompe l’oeil into nothing more than on the one hand a way of displaying technical skill, or on the other hand turning it into a visual joke. But sometimes I discovered new visual possibilities which I could use in the next painting. This led to succeeding cycles of painting, reading, analyzing, reflecting, and painting again.

In a later phase of the research, when staging the act of painting became an important research focus, the format of design driven researched proved to be most crucial, because only through the act of painting you can fully understand a painterly process, which is necessary for staging it. By reflecting on my own creation process, while being in the midst of it, I gained insights in how this process could be visualized in the pictorial language of my own paintings.