![Robert Bechtel - Alameda Intersection, Clay and Mound Streets [2004]](http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1595/24182308153_b3191d1c5a_o.jpg)
Although it depicts a place that would have been well known to Robert Bechtle, his own hometown of Alameda, Alameda Intersection–Clay and Mound Streets is at the same time both familiar and unfamiliar, real and unreal, homely and un-homely. Unheimlich, the German word for un-homely, has a second meaning in the German language–uncanny. An uncanny illusion is one that we find unsettling, one that forces us to re-examine how we perceive it, one that cause us to fathom how and why it came to be made. If it tricks the eye, it does so only fleetingly; its uncanniness is tied to its very artificiality, we comprehend it as a copy of something else, a deceitful double, yet we gape at its incredible realism. Alameda Intersection–Clay and Mound Streets epitomises Bechtle's dexterity in rendering the uncanny which has been so praised by Michael Auping: "A master of the deadpan, he creates images so familiar we have a hard time seeing them, let alone interpreting them. There are no specific political agendas, philosophical pretensions or spiritual overtones. Yet they carry an ineffable mystery about the meaning of a good–if not heroic–life in our time.”
[Sotheby’s, New York - Oil on canvas, 91.4 x 167.6 cm]