Aredheaded woman in a purple dress sits on a floral davenport, her head in her hands. Above her in the one-panel comic is a thought bubble that says “SOB,” next to a monstrous abstract painting of her. A caption under the composition reads “With stunning clarity, Brenda realized hiring that hip young artist to paint her portrait had been a huge mistake …” The Lichtenstein-style piece of pop art has been crumpled into a ball, smoothed flat, and hastily affixed to a greenish-gray wall with a messy strip of masking tape. Beneath that, there is a metal palette knife slathered in different paint colors that is also taped to the wall.

But lean in to touch the objects in Natalie Featherston’s When Disaster Strikes — The Art World Edition: Brenda’s Huge Mistake (2021) and you’ll find that what you thought was a piece of paper and a palette knife is actually a 19-inch-by-13.5-inch two-dimensional oil painting. This is what a trompe l’oeil artist is counting on: The split second when you go from being tricked to being in on the joke.

“There’s this shift in perspective that I don’t think you have with anything else. That’s what I love the most, that moment where they realize it’s not real,” says Featherston, whose recent paintings appear in a solo exhibition at Meyer Gallery, Faux Sho: Trompe L’oeil Double Visions, opening with a public reception on Friday, Oct. 22.

“Trompe l’oeil” is French for “to deceive the eye.” Though the historical tradition of painters playing with reality dates to ancient Greece, the term was first used in 1800, by the still-life painter Louis-Léopold Boilly. Trompe l’oeil paintings have cast shadows with very narrow depth perception. They look as if you could pull the objects depicted off the wall.

“The important thing about trompe l’oeil is having a strong, one-directional light source and a very pronounced cast shadow, because that’s what gives it that three-dimensional quality. I will spend a lot of time arranging things just to get the right kind of shape and value. The shadow is the money shot of trompe l’oeil,” Featherston says.

There’s usually some degree of humor to trompe l’oeil because the sudden shift in perspective is likely to bring about a laugh of recognition. But Featherston is overtly humorous. It’s a crucial part of her aesthetic and her personality.

“I’m a very happy person, a lighthearted person. There’s a lot of darkness out there. My work is not dark. I want people to have a piece that makes them smile. I want to cultivate whimsy.”

Featherston, 52, has been working in trompe l’oeil since the 1990s, after she gave up a promising career as a cellist to pursue an uncertain future as a visual artist.

“I was at Manhattan School of Music on a full scholarship. I woke up one morning and felt like I’d never made a decision to have this music career, and I was about to spend the rest of my life in an orchestra playing Mahler’s symphonies,” she says. “I dropped out of school and got a job waiting tables.”