In a recent conversation with the Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie published in Mousse magazine, the French-British artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz described McKenzie’s work as having “conscious slippage.” It sounded a bit cryptic, but after having visited her recent exhibition of paintings at the Antwerp gallery Micheline Szwajcer, I knew exactly what he meant. First of all, nothing in the exhibition is what it appears to be; the bulletin boards holding collages of items are in fact paintings, and the faux-Agatha Christie novel displayed on a pedestal literally covers up the recent chick-lit hit and title-giving novel Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. Both paintings and book cover are trompe l’oeil: an intended slippage between reality and illusion. Most of the works in this exhibition consist of recent additions to the series of paintings titled “Quodlibet,” a Latin term which, amongst other things, means “that which pleases”. McKenzie uses it here to refer to a genre within trompe l’oeil painting en vogue in architecture in the early 19th century which featured realistically rendered wall paintings of random items (playing-cards, ribbons, and scissors). Different from the Baroque use of architectural trompe l’oeil, which created the illusion of an expanded space—or in its …