With works often requiring second looks or sanity checks, artist Pejac bends reality in his use of paint and other materials to create sublime art from walls, streets, sidewalks and gutters.

His newest works in Paris, shown above and below, play with our sense of surface and depth, revealing a hidden world beyond the wall in each case. If the close-up scene looks familiar, you may recognize it as The Luncheon on the Grass by Manet.

Likewise implying something secret is this silhouette of a door – at a glance, it is hard to tell what part is a real crack in the concrete and which pieces are simply painted on top.

In previous projects, he has also played with the arts of subtraction and illusion in other clever ways – letting the world, for instance, slowly melt, drip and trickle toward the drain.

Some of these works are quite time-intensive and incredibly detail-sensitive, like this final piece in which the artist carefully chipped away at the white paint on a brick wall to selectively reveal the red surface below it.