Studio artist Antwerp 2008

The element of craftsmanship is equally important. Annerel carefully constructs his works: he copies the motifs with paint and tape, which he applies in various layers on the canvas, with layers of transparent resin between them. In this way, he creates depth—not an illusory depth that results from line or colour perspective, but a real, almost tangible depth. Yet once more we are immediately confronted with the question what is true and what is illusion, as the smoothly polished finishing layer strips them of their tactility and thus negates their depth. In other words, the traditional pictorial illusion is reversed: whereas the ordinary figurative painting is essentially two-dimensional but tries to create an illusion of three-dimensionality, these works bring about the opposite effect—the works have a real, literal depth, but create the illusion of being flat.