Ralf Arzt’s series "Trompe l’œil Hommage à Fontana" explores the encounter between illusion and reality, drawing on the Italian-Argentine artist Lucio Fontana’s radical challenge to the traditional boundaries of painting. Fontana became particularly renowned for his slashed canvases, in which he cut through the painted surface with a knife, thereby opening the painting onto physical space. In Fontana’s work, the cut is real—the canvas is actually pierced—and the painting consequently ceases to exist solely as an image on a surface.

Arzt reverses this idea through the use of trompe l’œil, a technique whose very purpose is to deceive the eye. Trompe l’œil relies on the painter creating such a convincing illusion of, for example, a hole, an opening, or a change in material that the viewer momentarily perceives the painted element as real. In Trompe l’œil Hommage à Fontana, the question of what is real and what is an image therefore becomes a central part of the experience of the work. Where Fontana made a real intervention in the painting, Arzt instead creates the illusion of such an intervention.