Felice Varini

One viewpoint, a whole building

Felice Varini, born in Locarno, Switzerland, in 1952 and based in Paris, makes large-scale anamorphic paintings. He paints bold, flat-coloured shapes, such as circles, squares, ellipses and lines, directly onto walls, floors, ceilings, staircases and the outsides of buildings. From almost everywhere, the result looks like scattered stripes and arcs crossing the architecture at odd angles. From one carefully chosen point, the fragments line up into a single clean shape that seems to float in front of the building.

It's the anamorphic principle taken to architectural scale. The shape isn't painted on a single flat surface but spread across a complex three-dimensional space at many distances and angles, and can only be decoded from the one place it was planned from. He has been making work like this since 1979.

How he works

Varini starts with a projector placed at the spot that will become the viewing point. He projects the shape onto the space, traces where the light falls on every surface, flat or angled, near or far, and paints exactly those areas, usually in a single strong colour that reads as a flat shape once aligned. The method is a physical version of the calculation in the anamorphic art demo, where a box is painted onto a pavement by following the line from one eye position through each corner to the ground.

His works have been made in historic buildings, public squares, museums, industrial sites and whole streets, often as public commissions. Because each depends on its site, most are temporary and survive in photographs taken from the viewing point, the same spot the projector stood.

Why it matters to perception

Varini's work shows clearly that the visual system interprets a scene by assuming a single, consistent viewpoint, and that a shape spread over surfaces at different distances can look whole only from the point it was designed for. It relies on the same perspective rules that Renaissance artists formalised and that anamorphic painting has explored for centuries (Kemp, 1990). What's distinctive is the scale, and the way it makes the viewer's own position part of the work: you can walk round the space and watch the shape fall apart and come back together as you move.