Hunting a Snark? | Rudi Knoops

Felice Varini is a Swiss painter obsessed with perspective. His canvas however is architectural space.

He explains in an interview:

I start my works from one vantage point, which is simply the height of my own eye level. This is only a starting point, a way to begin. I plan the work using sketches, pictures, camera, or just in my head. And I work with the space, considering the relationship of my view point with the space as well as the geometry of the space itself. Then I make the painting.

[...]

If [the viewer] is aware of the work, he might observe it from the vantage point and see the complete shape. But he might look from other points of views where he will not be able to understand the painting because the shapes will be fragmented and the work too abstract. Whichever way, that is ok with me.

'Huits carrés' - from vantage point

'Huits carrés' - off vantage point

Varini’s work is an interesting contemporary iteration of single-point perspective:

Instead of using single-point perspective to capture a 3 dimensional physical (or architectural) space on a 2 dimensional canvas, Felice Varini projects (from a single-point perspective) the content of a never painted 2D canvas onto a 3D physical space, where it is really painted.

The viewer sees broken, fragmented forms and shapes and lines superimposed on the architectural space. But from one vantage point all these fragmented lines and shapes coalesce into one geometrical form.

Vercorin, été 2009 - read more on 'makezine.com'

This clearly is a contemporary form of anamorphosis and reminiscent of  the technique used in e.g Emmanuel Maignan’s anamorphic fresco in the Monasterio of SS. Trinità dei Monti in Rome (1642).

read more about: 'Anamorphosis - 'Distorted perspective' at Trinità dei Monti