Word: oeil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most visible and palpable form of the Antique was stone. Sculpture afforded the model for painting, and Mantegna took its implications much further. Time and again, his paintings look like renderings of actual stone bas-reliefs, trompe l'oeil records of a scene carved by some imaginary dead hand. The figures and tent of Judith with the Head of Holofernes, circa 1495-1500, are painted with matte gray gouache on fine linen, but they seem at first glimpse to be actual stone. So little in art is new: what Mantegna was doing with this play of illusion...
...tried to eat them. Parrhasius outdid him, however, by fashioning a curtain that Zeuxis, mistaking for fabric, attempted to pull open. A long line of artists have since striven to equal Parrhasius' success by bestowing an illusory third dimension to flat, featureless walls and ceilings. Known as trompe l'oeil (fool the eye), the style reached its prime in the Renaissance and during the Baroque period, when painters embellished churches and palaces with imaginary soaring columns, weighty domes and clouded skies inhabited by plump putti...
...previous American artist had touched both highbrow and middlebrow in this way, and few would manage to do so later. Church was an inventive showman. Heart of the Andes, more than 5 ft. by 9 ft., went on view in a trompe l'oeil architectural frame built, literally, like a picture window, so that one sat down on a bench and had the illusion of gazing from a Victorian living room into sublimity, complete with palms, parrots and Andean campesinos adoring a cross. If his other paintings prefigured CinemaScope, this one was the ancestor of the big-screen home...