Word: oeil
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...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...
...Perception is the fifth dimension," he cries in this delirious monologue, and that is just about the only dimension left to him. On Designer Sirlin's trompe l'oeil stage, the first three dimensions dissolve, shift and disappear; on the spaceship, the fourth, time, is relative and thus meaningless. By the end, a half-crazed M. (the work's title comes from M.'s description of the pounding sounds in his head) has forgotten most of his ordeal, but is left to fear that the nightmare will begin again...
...bland, meaningless abstraction. Vanderbyl's best occupy that ambiguous zone just this side of abstraction; although highly refined, they suggest serendipity and imperfection, the real world in other words. For a World War II shipyard turned condo development, a star of horizontal stripes is given a trompe l'oeil, waving-flag wrinkle. For a printing company, a triangle is composed of lithographic printer's dots that actually muddle and blur...
Despite his use of the art-crit lingo that is a hazard of the profession, the Andover-Princeton educated Stella does a fine job of explaining how Caravaggio's painting surpassed the tradition of trompe l'oeil--literally "fool the eye," meaning those paintings designed to be mistaken for real. Stella believes Caravaggio's greatest accomplishment was in his command of space, painting figures that not only look three-dimensional, but seem to expand out of the front and back of the canvas...
During the past decade, his work has become coherent and confident again, partly by means of a lightly worn classicism. For the Zueblin construction company's new headquarters outside Stuttgart, he has produced an improbable but marvelous synthesis. A kind of oversize trompe l'oeil portcullis, Zueblin House is monumental and yet entirely permeable, lucid but not glib. The clear, simple axes and pitched-roof profile are classical, and the expansive ectoskeletal shed seems snatched from some 19th century dream of the 20th. The building's priapic pivot alludes to Bohm's own pioneering work: the central spiraling stair could...