Faux amis

English and French words that look or sound alike, but have different meanings, are called false cognates or "faux amis". Lists of them abound on the internet, eg here - some common examples are library and libraire (bookshop), journey and journée (day), money and monnaie (coins), location and location (rental). 

Are there visual faux amis? I suggest these two pairs, for a start.

Rachel Whiteread, Herringbone Floor (detail), 2001

Cornelia Parker, Black Path (Bunhill Fields), 2013, and Jerusalem, 2015

Whiteread's drawing of a parquet floor was transferred to a sheet of birch plywood, which was laser cut, leaving the lines that represent the spaces between the tiles. Their unevenness is meant to represent the wear and tear of a lived space. "Rachel Whiteread takes casts of furniture and even whole buildings, transforming into solid form the spaces in or around the objects of daily life. Such pieces have a strong metaphysical presence, often evoking a sense of history, of previous lives or deaths in particular spaces. Her sculpture is usually on a large scale; she famously cast a terraced house in the East End of London – a venture that won her the Turner Prize in 1993. The scale of Herringbone Floor is modest by comparison, yet conveys similar notions about space, history, presence and absence. The artist has used the pattern of a wooden-block floor as a medium for expressing the 'space' between the blocks." (via)

Parker's casts of the spaces in pavements are black patinated bronze, one of William Blake's burial ground, and the other from East Jerusalem. "Parker had often played ‘don’t step on the lines’ or Hopscotch while walking her daughter to school on a route that took them through the graveyard. These games rekindled an obsession with pavement cracks that had lain dormant since the artist’s own childhood. By pouring liquid cold-cure rubber into some of the gaps and letting it set, Parker was able to lift up this part the geography of the city that had been mapped out in stone many years before. The captured rubber cracks were upturned and then cast in black bronze. Placed on steel pins, they appear to hover just above the floor, creating an obstacle in the form of a petrified line drawing." (via)

Fred Williams, Riverbed, 1981

John Wallbank, Untitled (Sewn Cube), 2016

Williams' work is about the Australian landscape, some of it influenced by aerial views. He used a "calligraphic shorthand" to represent elements in the landscape. As well as painting, he was a printmaker.

Wallbank's cube presents an expanse of whiteness from a distance, but put your eye to a crack and "the other side" of the sewing that holds the cube's cloth covers together is revealed. It's made of resin, fibreglass, pigment, plywood, polypropylene rope (photo here). Wallbank's sculptural objects often use lacing as a kind of drawing.