Whether enjoying the sight of shadow puppets against a wall or the suggestive placing of objects in an Austin Powers movie, people have long delighted in the playful use of images.
"Visual Deception," at the Bunkamura Museum of Art in Tokyo collects together almost 150 artworks from various countries and epochs that, in a number of ways, make us question how images can deceive us.
One of the oldest ways in art of tricking the viewer is tromp l'oeil — optical illusions of views or objects that are designed to disguise their own fiction and make the viewer believe they are seeing the real thing. Early in the exhibition, "Escaping Criticism" by Spanish artist Pere Borrell del Caso provides a clear example of this — a boy climbing out of a picture frame toward the viewer. The picture frame is a painted one, safely inside the painting's real gilded frame but the work's effect comes from the perceived disruption of the boundary between real and fictitious space.
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