Anamorphic Colour Illusions

One of the most fascinating first term studio builds for Foundation was one influenced by the work of artists such as Georges Rousse and Felice Varini. We had for a couple of years been looking at colour in space and in order to do this in one session we had students making small boxes within which they would insert different tints and tones of primary or secondary colours, and adjust their spatial positions so that they created the illusion that they sat in the same plane.  At some point (this must have been around 1994/5) someone decided that it would be better to have students working towards an architectural scale in groups to solve this problem. In order to introduce more precision and control it was further decided that they could create large scale anamorphic illusions in a similar fashion to Varini or Rousse’s work.

Working in teams students would initially be asked to share their collections of colour. I have mentioned before that students were often split into groups to collect primary and secondary colours. A large scale illusion of a simple geometric shape would be decided on, a square, circle, triangle etc. and then this would be plotted out over whatever structures were around, often these structures would be left over from the last project. So these might be anything from giant cardboard tools to 3D forms made from the synthesis of two different materials and their structural possibilities. (Another project that I will at some point look at). It was important that these forms could be seen as ‘intact’ geometric wholes from one unique point of view and that they could be constructed over a complex space that would usually include at least two walls, some floor and over several inventions. It’s easier to explain by looking at one of Varini’s pieces.

This is how the final installation looks, seen from a unique fixed point of view.

However if you are anywhere but at the unique viewpoint you can see the forms for what they really are, as in the images below and also walk amongst them.

The students’ would often make far more complicated pieces that the one above, their colours being made of paper, textiles, objects and whatever else they had managed to collect and the forms riding over a far wider range of surfaces. However the final result was similar. There was also an attempt to deal with atmospheric perspective, sharper more intense colours being kept for parts of the images furthest away from the viewer and less saturated colours placed in areas closer to the viewer. Hopefully if it was going to work correctly these differences in colour saturation would optically even themselves out as the eye adjusted its atmospheric spatial colour read.

The best of these images were totally convincing and of course photographed really well; eventually staff and students would then walk into the middle of the constructions to break the illusion. The photographs of course needed to be taken in such a way that these convincing illusions were surprisingly broken. Part of the yellow base of a triangle perhaps revealed to be a yellow bath-duck sitting on the floor, its left hand point a yellow duster pinned to a wall fifteen feet further back. The patches of colour could spread out quite some way into the studio spaces and they were far more broken up than the images of Varini’s above.

These constructions could take a full five days, but it was worth it because of the amount of learning involved. First of all, point of view was vital, and this was a great way for students to get their head around how important this was. The project was often their first ever site specific installation. They would usually use a camera set on a tripod for this, taking it in turns to check that everything worked correctly. The next issue was teamwork; someone always had to be directing others, it was impossible to do this on your own. The next issue was that an audience was vital to the ‘realisation’ of the piece, people needed to walk into the environment and experience it. For those who would eventually work with installations, be these design or fine art based, it was a powerful lesson, not least of course being how important it was to work with ambition on an architectural scale.  Precision was of course vital and any piece of colour out of key would pop forward or backwards and destroy the illusion, and because of the team working mentality we had a much better quality control system, each student checking on the work of others, so that the project maintained high levels of integrity. Finally the importance of documentation was raised. The work only made sense to others who had not experienced it photographically; the camera and its one eye, being part of the message of the work.