If you ask me if there is a city that satisfies all your fantasies about castles, I can tell you without hesitation, it is Carcassonne in France.
In 2018, to celebrate the important festival of Carcassonne Castle being declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, artist Felice Varini from Switzerland, commissioned by the National Centre for Monuments of the City of Carcassonne, dressed Carcassonne's fortress in bright yellow.
The whole castle is shrouded in a wonderful visual difference, these concentric circles slowly unfold throughout the space like waves, and only at certain angles can the broken circles form a complete body.
From a distance, the castle seems to have been "magical", which makes people want to explore deeper mysteries.
01
Anti-Mona Lisa's trompe l'oeil artist
Born in 1952 in Locarno, Switzerland, Felice Varini is a visual artist who uses architecture and urban landscapes as canvases, using geometric illusion art to cut and reconstruct the existing landscape in front of the viewer to create many breathtaking installations.
Looking back on his artistic career, Varini says he became an artist in 1978. Inspired by Varini's move to Geneva in 1972 to work as a stage set in a theatre, he began to envision two-dimensional art in a three-dimensional space.
In the process of nearly 40 years, Varini has used geometric figures composed of circles, rectangles, lines, etc., to create many public art works with clear visual rhythm in architecture and urban spaces, and has been hailed by the art world as "the illusion artist against the Mona Lisa".
When you first see Varini's work, you may be confused, isn't this just a bunch of broken geometric shapes? But in fact, these works can only see the illusion of shape at a specific angle and height, and when you move to an optimal viewing angle, the complete pattern seems to pop out of the scene.
These works seem to be just a patchwork and accumulation of geometric lines, but in fact, each pattern requires the artist's precise calculation, as well as a grasp of space, depth of field and projection in concrete practice. And when the audience stands at the best angle, the artist also has a dialogue with the audience in time and space.
02
An incredible circle on the Alps
In the summer of 2009, Felice Varini carried out a large-scale artistic work "Cercle et suite d'éclats" in the mountainous village of Vercollín in Switzerland.
Varini made meticulous calculations using geometric formulas, carefully painting metallic paint powder throughout the town.
At first glance, these broken circles look like scattered fragments, without logic and order, but in fact, when the viewer looks at the town from a precise angle, all the patterns will form a very three-dimensional image in the space.
Note that this is not a PS effect! Although it seems that Varini has only painted some colored paint on the wall, it looks like an aperture suspended above the town from a distance, which is both three-dimensional and full of mystery.
Varini uses this wonderful art of geometric illusion to cut and reconstruct the existing landscape in front of people's eyes, turning the small town of Vercorin into a very modern art work of art, attracting countless tourists.
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Diagonal on the crane
Located on the east side of the Yangpu Riverside Power Plant Site Park, Diagonal of the Crane is Felice Varini's first outdoor project in Shanghai and his first on a structure of this industrial type.
In this work, Varini uses the simplest geometric figures to create his work, using white as a complementary color to orange, giving the heavy body a feeling of movement and creating a strong visual impact.
Based on the original industrial relics of the river, the orange-red crane is covered with white geometric lines, and only when the visitor reaches a certain correct angle, all the straight lines can be connected to form a complete pattern. And finding the right place to watch is a game of "hide-and-seek" played by artists and the public.
"It's nice that the public doesn't have to go to museums and galleries and can see my work while walking along the Yangpu River." Now the work has become one of the most artistic check-in places on the Yangpu River, attracting countless tourists.
The combination of art and the city does not mean that the city should be transformed with works of art. In a way, this large-scale art installation is also an "archaeology" of an industrial structure.
How to coordinate and integrate the works with the environment of urban architecture and urban public space, so that people can feel the endless vitality of urban culture, is Varini's lifelong artistic pursuit.
Some of the pictures in the article come from the Internet,
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