Trompe l’oeil and street art

A bit of culture: it’s always handy being able to drop a french word into conversation while sipping cider at the pub, it sounds cool.

As Wikipedia explains, trompe l’oeil  is “an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions”. The name is french and means ‘to deceive the eye’. It was also used by the Greeks and the Romans (see, for instance,Pompei in Italy) but  it thrived during the baroque period producing incredible results of perspective illusion .

When you speak about it, people think about cheesy badly made sea views in american-italian houses, however it’s widely used by street artists to create different worlds, to open unexpected doors to imaginary spaces or to make a shallow reality prettier.