Seeing Sight: Illusionism in Visual Culture

A digital exhibition by Anna Daly. Faculty of Art, Design and ArchitecturePresented by Monash University LibraryOctober 2017 - February 2018Caulfield Library

Trompe l’oeil means “trick of the eye”. The term refers to illusionistic paintings
produced in Europe in the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries with these
paintings often described as being hyper-realistic. Since the late eighteenth century,
trompe l’oeil have offended the sensibilities of artists, designers and writers in a
context where, for philosophical, historical, social and aesthetic reasons, there
was a movement away from figurative realism in art and design.
This PhD project seeks to examine the distaste for illusionism and demonstrate
the ways in which that distaste has allowed the importance of illusionism to
modern Western art and design traditions to be obscured. Chiefly, the research
has been directed at problematising the way in which trompe l’oeil paintings
have been distinguished from art proper by raising questions about the way
illusionism is defened. That definition may seem straightforward in a comparison of
a seventeenth-century Dutch trompe l’oeil painting with a twentieth-century work
of abstract art. However, the idea of what counts as a realistic, and thus, hyper-realistic depiction is historically and culturally contextual: the degree to which
any painting could be considered illusionistic beyond the immediate context of
its production is diffcult to ascertain. The research also engages with a parallel
investigation into how forms not generally considered illusionistic, such as colonial
landscapes, portrait photography and wallpaper, might be considered so. The
artistic and historical legacies that fostered the emergence and popularity of these
forms have ensured that each is illusionistic when we imagine a viewership beyond
that envisaged in Renaissance treatises on perspective. This research is not trying
to argue that trompe l’oeil paintings are not illusionistic. By attributing the strange
effects of these paintings to something more than the detailed renditions of reality
they apparently offer it is an attempt, instead, to begin thinking about them in
richer and more expansive ways.