When someone tells you it’s a grain of sand, there’s a moment where your reality falls apart and you have to reconstruct it. You have to step back and ask what the image is and what it means.

Only in the 20th century, artists started taking the study of perception in a more humane way. They were thinking about the eye as being an instrument, the whole body as being a visual instrument. That sort of gave way a little bit with Cartesian­ - the "Cogito ergo sum" argument. It's not, "I think therefore I exist." It's, "I feel therefore I think therefore I exist."

If you find an idea without form, please let me know because I would love to take a picture of it.

Illusions as bad as mine make people aware of the fallacies of visual information and the pleasure to be derived from such fallacies.

Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.

I don't want to fool people. If I wanted to do that, I would be working with virtual reality. I want to operate on the other level, the other end of the illusion spectrum. I want to create the worst possible illusions so it doesn't really fool people, but instead give people a measure of their own belief. It makes them aware of how much they need to be fooled in order to understand the world around them.

In the back of every painting there's an entire universe that makes it possible for the painting to be there: an army of conservators, technicians, people who maintain these things, the market.