A Matter of Perspective : In Patrick Hughes's paintings, nothing is what it seems.

Matthew Flowers, director of the Flowers East art gallery in London, has seen it many times--the peculiar series of motions that people go through when they catch sight of a Patrick Hughes painting for the first time. "We call it the Patrick Hughes dance," says Flowers. "They stop. They walk backwards." They crane their necks left and right and bob their heads up and down, as if they can't believe what they're seeing. As they move, everything in these paintings seems to move with them. Bookshelves swivel, walls shift, a series of parallel doors opens onto a vista of the Great Wall of China. "When we show Hughes's work at art fairs, people think it's done with mirrors or electric motors," says Flowers. "But there's no trick. The trick is in your own mind."

Flowers has seen the "dance" dozens of times a day since Hughes's latest show opened at his gallery on Feb. 14. Entitled "Whopperspective," the exhibition encompasses many of Hughes's finest works, some of which sell for as much as $80,000. All the paintings combine elements of realism and surrealism with the dizzying perspective that has become Hughes's trademark. "He creates the most seamless illusions I've ever seen," says New York art dealer Louis Meisel, who laments only that two-dimensional photos cannot convey the illusions of movement properly.

To achieve these effects, Hughes starts with three-dimensional canvases that resemble giant Toblerone chocolate bars turned on their sides. Repeating triangles or pyramids jut out toward the viewer. As you move from side to side, the vantage of one surface against the other shifts, creating the impression that ...