Authors: Benito Navarrete Prieto, Kristen Nassif and Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga (essays); Mar Borobia and M.ª Eugenia Alonso (sections); Fernando Quesada (commentary on the work Sin trampas by Isidro Blasco)
Curators: Mar Borobia and Guillermo Solana
Spanish Language
Paperback binding with false endpapers.
ISBN: 9788417173654
Dimensions: 21 x 25.5 cm (width x height).
Pages: 200.
As all the authors of this catalogue remind us, we owe to Pliny the Elder the founding fable of trompe-l'oeil, starring the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Zeuxis paints grapes so real that birds come to peck at them; Parrhasius, on the other hand, surpasses him by painting a curtain that fools Zeuxis himself. This anecdote expresses very well the duality of pictorial illusionism. Zeuxis turns us into simple creatures like birds, returning us to a naive attitude of childlike wonder. Parrhasius, on the other hand, represents the reflective, almost philosophical dimension of trompe-l'oeil, because it highlights the fictional nature of painting. This is the metapictorial potential of trompe-l'oeil, which was so interesting in the Baroque and which again intrigued the masters of the twentieth century, from Picasso and Braque to Magritte or Dalí and many others.
This publication reveals all the registers of illusionism, from the simple still life to the most complex games with the frame and the window, the niche and the cupboard, the curtain, the quodlibet, the grisaille. The diversity of the deception is no less: there are simulations of form, relief and texture, simulations of marble and worn wood, of folded papers and the folds of cloth. The exhibition covers a wide historical arc, from the Renaissance to the present day, but always mixing times, combining ancient, modern and contemporary works, because in trompe l'oeil there is always something that surpasses time and that returns identical but different each time.
