Art: Trompe l'oeil as more than visual trickery

Trompe l'oeil illusionism goes back to antiquity, so its conventions are well established. Yet it has evolved from the straightforward visual trickery of the 19th-century variety to a more substantive imitative realism that can resonate emotionally and historically.

This is the impression one takes away from the exhibition "Reality Check" at the Brandywine River Museum, which owns a substantial collection of earlier trompe-l'oeil painting (French for "fool the eye").

Through 45 works by 23 artists, "Reality Check" shows us how artists working today have extended and enriched what is usually thought of as little more than technical sleight-of-hand.

Technique remains the core of contemporary trompe l'oeil; if anything, these artists are even more meticulously proficient than historical masters such as William Michael Harnett and John Haberle, whose work was featured at the museum earlier this year.

Some artists in the exhibition continue to use established formats such as the rack picture, which is essentially two-dimensional, and the niche picture, which introduces shallow depth and allows depiction of objects rather than flat images such as postcards, letters and photographs.

Among the former, for example, are Otto Duecker's simulated photographs of Salvador Dalí and the Dalai Lama, painted in oils as if taped to a wall, and Madame X Desk Blotter by Michael Theise, built around a reproduction of a famous portrait by John Singer Sargent, which is flanked by envelopes addressed to the artist and his subject.

Among the niche compositions, Scott Fraser's Catenary Curve also relies on art-historical references, beginning with a painting by Jacques-Louis David called Death of Marat. This image leads us to a portrait of an aristocratic woman by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, which Fraser links to Henri Matisse's Lady in Blue.

All these re-creations are arranged in a niche against a black background similar to that used by David, which brings the chain of association back to its source. There is more to contemplate in this painting than Fraser's ability to mimic the masters.

The single work that most dramatically reveals the complexity of contemporary trompe l'oeil is a bulletin-board picture by Steve Mills called Krista. A commissioned memorial to a college student who died in a car crash, the painting re-creates the student's life through a dense collection of ephemera that she had pinned to her bulletin board.