While technological sleights of hand grow more and more sophisticated, it is important to remember that sometimes paint, pencil, and sunlight are all that is needed to create transformative works of art. 

A good example of the latter approach comes from Italian artist Peeta, a Venice-based muralist who transforms buildings through the application of surrealistic, larger-than-life murals. 

On his website, Peeta states that his approach is geared toward using art to nudge viewers out of their everyday mindset, while still maintaining certain ties to the physical realities of the built environment. He says, "when painting on walls, my aim is always to create a dialogue with the structural and cultural parameters of the surrounding context, either architectural or not."

Peeta's work is best suited for corners, where the artist is able to render flat planes and deep visual fields of shape and color that trick your eye into forgetting that these works are layered on top of everyday buildings and spaces. Working both on canvas and on buildings, Peeta is able to dematerialize perspective views of buildings through graphic, colorful, and explosive arrangements that create their own environmental and visual qualities. These paintings, which Peeta dubs "anamorphic works," are inspired by abstracted calligraphy and stem from the artists's younger days as a graffiti artist. 

Peeta says, "through my anamorphic works I redesign the volumes of any kind of surface involved, thus causing with my paintings a 'temporary interruption of normality' by altering the perception of familiar contexts, and so raising a different understanding of spaces and, consequently, of reality on a whole."

For Peeta the goal is to disrupt particular elements of architecture in a way that creates new contextual conditions where the shadows, textures, and forms he creates can take on a life separate from whatever they might be painted on. The effect is that buildings take on a pictorial quality, a sense that Peeta often amplifies through the keen application of sky-blue fields of color that make his canvases literally disappear into the background.

The artist continues, "Anamorphism totally embodies the intent, always pivotal in my production, to reveal the deceptiveness of human perception, the fallacy of narrow and fixed points of view through visual tricks which, proceeding from the attempt to confer a three-dimensional semblance on a pictorial representation, ultimately reveal their will to deceive."

For more examples of Peeta's works, see the artist's Instagram.