Pere Borrell del Caso
Have you ever felt that your best friends are actually made out of paper? That is, that you feel a kinship with a character from a book or painting? This happened to me when I opened the first page of Balzac’s Illusions Perdues. It felt as if Balzac was not writing characters; he simply reported what the characters did out of their own free will. Trompe-l’œil, French for “deceive the eye,” is an art style that aims to break the fourth wall (such as when a character in a play or movie suddenly speaks directly to the audience). This painting by del Caso is for the perfect example of it. The art aims to approach the spectator, conscious of its condition but transcending its borders, like a narrator acknowledging the reader with the wink of an eye. Have you ever dried your eyes on something more than a paper sheet? Did you ever shared a secret with a friend confined in a world unlike our own? Oscar Wilde once said, “life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” I couldn’t agree more.
Artur Deus Dionisio